Impact of Internal Marketing on Service Quality and Customers Satisfaction A Case Study of Equity Bank, Kengeleni Branch

Abstract

According to Piercy and Morgan (1991) external customer satisfaction cannot be achieved without the fundamental contribution of the customer-contact employees who provide the service. The front-line employees of the bank interact with the majority of customers and generally handle a wide range of banking transactions. Because of the importance of the service provided, Bank firms should support customer-contact employees in order to acquire communicative sale skills and make them feel comfortable and satisfied with their job. The above ascertainment emerged the concept of Internal Marketing (IM). According to the Berry and Parasuraman (1991) each business should develop Internal Marketing programmes that would focus on the internal market (employees) in parallel to those for its external market (customers) in order to provide high quality services to its customers continuously. Consequently, external customer satisfaction cannot be achieved without the fundamental contribution of the employees who provide the service. Therefore managers who are concerned with monitoring and improving external customer satisfaction, need to develop employees’ competence in order to act as “part-time” marketers for the organisation. The key for employees’ competence is Internal Marketing, Gummesson (1987) where head office is highly involved in strategic and planning IM whereas senior and middle level managers have more tactic role. The implementation of Internal Marketing is carried out by the employees of the branches in order to transfer this philosophy into Bank’s customers.The present case study aims to examine the adoption of IM concept from Equity Bank’s Kengeleni branch employees and its impact on service delivery and customer satisfaction.The discussion of the findings contributes to understanding how Internal Marketing influences service delivery by the employees and how they are linked to the customer satisfaction of the banks customers. It seems that Equity bank deem employee training and evaluation of performance with reward system as crucial, although improvement is required in the way that the company’s mission statement is communicated and understood among the different employee grades