Customer Service in Digital Era and Role of Internal Markets

Creating Relationship Marketing Culture In Internal Markets

The focus of internal marketing is to get and retain customer conscious employees (Grönroos, 1990). Organizational culture significantly affects employees’ eagerness to serve customers (Bellou, 2007). Thus, as Bellou (2007) indicates, it is important to establish a culture that allows employee involvement, facilitative management styles, and decentralized decision-making. The organizational culture has to reward customer orientation practices; especially promoting the customer service orientation practices among front-line employees is essential.

Inter-functional cooperation is needed in all forms of value creation. Motivated and customer conscious employee at all levels of the firm can be possible by improving the open two way communications and coordinating tasks between the front line and support staff. When the various parts of an organization act without cohesion, this will constrain the performance of employees and front line employee (Ballantyne, 2000). Thus firms that want to create high customer value by adopting relationship marketing strategies must create an internal environment where all functions of the organization proactively communicate, understand and inform each other.