Developing and Maintaining a Service Culture

Abstract

The spotlight on Isadore Sharp and the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts shows the critical importance of developing a service culture in order to enable superior customer service. Having a service culture is one part of internal marketing, the focus of this chapter. Internal marketing was introduced in Chapter 1 as an integral part of the services marketing triangle (see Figure 1.2), and can be defined as marketing aimed internally, targeted at a company’s own employees. Internal marketing takes place through the fulfilling of promises. Promises are easy to make, but unless, like at the Four Seasons, employees are recruited, trained, equipped with tools and appropriate internal systems, and rewarded for good service, the promises may not be kept. Internal marketing was first proposed in the 1970s (Berry et al., 1976) as a way to deliver consistently high service quality, but despite the rapidly growing literature on internal marketing, very few organizations actually apply the concept in practice. One of the main problems is that a single unified concept of what is meant by internal marketing does not exist. Lack of investment in internal marketing may also be the result of corporate distraction. Companies that are busy trying to boost revenues and cut costs may not see why they should spend money on employees, thus missing the point that these are the very people who ultimately deliver the brand promises the company makes.