UNDERSTANDING THE IMPACT OF INTERNAL SERVICE QUALITY (SERVQUAL) ON INTERNAL CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: A STUDY AT ONE OF THE PRIVATE COMPANIES IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Employees are the most important asset in organization. The good services they provided might lead to the customers’ loyalty because of their satisfaction with the service experiences. Other than external customers, employees as internal customers also important to be concerned since they are the part of the successful business operations. Anyone in an organization who consumes services or products provided by other employees in the same organization known as internal customers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between internal service quality and internal customer satisfaction at one of the private companies in Malaysia. Quantitative research was conducted through survey of 111 employees and the data analysed by using Statistical Package for Social Skills (SPSS) software based on a set of questionnaires. The results showed that there are significant and positive relationships between SERVQUAL dimensions which are reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangible and internal customer satisfaction. The findings from the analysis also shows that tangible, reliability, and empathy factor have high correlation to internal customer satisfaction while responsiveness and assurance factors have a moderate correlation to internal customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is recommended for the organization to promote the internal customer satisfaction by developing a strategic approach on tangible, reliability, and empathy dimensions of the SERVQUAL for the internal customer who are the organization’s employees. As for future research, the research should be extended to include broader population from private and public companies throughout Malaysia to be able for the results to be generalized into other population.