THE INTERNAL MARKETING DEVELOPMENT PROCESS PDF

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The internal marketing development process, establishment of a service culture, weak culture, reversing the conventional business scheme, unexpected situations, adaptation of the marketing concept to human resource management, the hiring process, work in team, the importance of initial training, con...

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THE INTERNAL MARKETING DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

In the field of internal marketing, procedures and techniques must be developed to ensure that employees are able and willing to offer a high quality service. The concept of internal marketing arises when marketing processes aimed at employees are formalized. Internal marketing ensures that employees at all levels of the company are involved in the business and understand its various activities in an environment that supports customer knowledge. The goal of internal marketing is to enable employees to deliver satisfying products to customers. As Christian Grönroos points out, "the concept of internal marketing indicates that, as an internal market, employees are better motivated to adopt an attitude of service and approach to the customer thanks to the existence of an active market orientation in which a variety of activities are used internally, actively and coordinated". Internal marketing uses a marketing perspective to manage company staff. Internal marketing is therefore aimed at the company's employees, and is a process that involves the following stages: 1. Establishment of a culture of service. 2. Adaptation of the concept of marketing to the management of human resources. 3. Dissemination of marketing information among employees. Establishing a culture of service An internal marketing program goes beyond the culture of service. An internal marketing and service program is doomed to failure if the company culture does not support customer service. Some companies that invest millions of euros in customer service activities get poor results. One of the reasons for such failures is because the corporate culture of such organizations is not service-oriented. Such companies perform customer service activities that they think generate satisfied customers and a greater amount of revenue, but in the short term they have found that a good customer service program requires more than working with motivated staff. An internal marketing program requires a strong commitment from management. A major barrier to internal marketing programs is the middle management levels. Some managers have been trained to look closely at costs and increase profits. Its recognition programmes are based on not exceeding certain costs. Imagine the attitude of a hotel's front desk staff returning from a training workshop and showing a lot of motivation to serve the customer; maybe the staff will take a little more time to help a client or maybe they give away complimentary spa cards as compensation for a bad experience lived by a guest at the hotel. At the same time, imagine the attitude of the manager of that hotel who did not attend the training

workshop and who may think that the extra time invested in the guest is unproductive and that the services given are a waste. If management expects employee attitudes toward the customer to be positive, management itself must have a positive attitude toward customers and employees. Very often companies hire trainers so that employees who work in contact with customers take pains to offer a high quality service. The effect of these sessions often has a short life because companies make little effort to support employees who are in contact with customers. Managers ask receptionists to be friendly and helpful, but receptionists are often understaffed. For example, the initial greeting designed to make receptionists seem sincere and helpful on the phone, "Hotel Fernandez, good morning, Jesus speaks to you, how can I help you?", would be empty if after three seconds it were said in a cutting tone: "Can you wait, please?" From the customer's point of view, the result of waiting for someone to pick up, has been a cold and hurried greeting, followed by more waiting time. Management must develop a culture of service: a culture that supports customer service through policies, procedures, reward systems, and actions. A company culture is the set of shared beliefs and values that gives meaning to the members of a company, providing them with the rules to behave within the organization. In well-run companies, everyone in the organization embraces that culture. A strong culture helps companies in two ways. First, it directs behavior. Culture is important to service companies because every customer and every experience is different. Staff must possess common sense in creating and delivering a service experience, so that both needs and expectations are met. Second, a strong culture gives employees a sense of the purpose of the company and makes them feel good about the organization they work in. Likewise, they know what your company wants to achieve and how everyone helps to achieve that goal. Culture works like a glue that holds the organization together. When a company has a strong culture, it and its employees act as a unit. However, a company that has a strong culture may not necessarily have a culture of service. A strong service culture influences employees to act with the customer in mind and is the first step towards developing a customer-oriented organization. The development of a customer-oriented company requires a commitment on the part of management in both time and financial resources. Switching to a system that is customer-oriented may require changes in hiring, training, reward systems, and resolution of customer complaints, as well as the authority for employees to make decisions; it requires managers to spend time talking to both customers and the employees who are in contact with them. In other words, management must commit to these changes. A culture of service does not arise from a message sent by the CEO. A culture of service develops over a long time through the actions taken by management. For example, a hotel manager who spends time thanking

guests and asking their opinion about the service during morning check-out and afternoon check-in will demonstrate his concern for guests. In some companies, management spends time working very close to the staff serving customers. This action clearly demonstrates to employees that managers do not want to lose touch with what is happening on the front line and that they care about both customers and employees. In this way, an internal marketing program that is developed without the support of management will be unproductive. Companies cannot expect their employees to develop customer orientation on their own if the company's management does not explicitly support it. Weak culture Companies with a weak business culture have few standards and few common values. Employees are often subject to policies and rules, although these policies may not make sense from a customer service perspective. As a result, employees feel insecure when making decisions about a problem that is outside the rules and regulations. Since there are no established values, employees do not know what behavior is expected of them and waste time thinking about how they should behave; when they find a solution to a problem, they must ask the supervisor's permission before implementing it. Similarly, supervisors may feel the need to delegate responsibility to a superior. Throughout this decision-making process, the guest waits minutes, hours, days or even months to receive a response. In contrast, in a company with a strong service culture employees know what to do and do it. Customers receive a quick answer to their questions and quick solutions to their problems. When one has contact with an organization that has a strong culture of service, the recognition of this type of culture is immediate. In the culture of the Marriott hotel chain there is an instinctive and automatic predisposition to look at the customer when making decisions about how to run an organization. J. Willard Bill Marriott Jr., president of Marriott International, is consistent in predicting the need to teach and remind workers about the customer and about service. When a guest enters a chain hotel, they receive a genuine and warm welcome from the staff, who sincerely want to make their customers feel good. There is a difference in the way the guest feels welcomed by an employee who has a genuine interest in guests and conveys it, and an employee who doesn't care. Make sure your employees care about their guests. Turning around the conventional scheme of enterprise The conventional business structure is a triangular structure. For example, the structure of a hotel is occupied at the top corner of the triangle by the general direction and the direction of operations (corporate address). The general manager is at the next level, followed by department heads, supervisors, employees and customers. Ken Blanchard, author of the book One minute manager, argues that the problem in the business structure is that everyone is working for their boss.

Employees want to do their job well and care about what supervisors think of it; in turn, department heads worry about how the CEO looks at them, and CEOs want shareholders to have a good impression of them. The problem with this type of organization is that everyone is concerned about satisfying the people who are above them in the company and devote very little customer service. When a company adopts a culture of services, the structure of the company reverses its meaning. Customers are now at the top of the organization and corporate management is at the core of the structure. In this type of organization, everyone works to serve the customer. Corporate management helps their general managers do so, general managers work to make their departments serve the customer, department heads develop systems that will allow their supervisors to better serve the customer, and supervisors help employees serve the customer. For example, a bellboy at the Ritz-Carlton hotel took luggage to a guest about an hour after check-in, due to an error. Once the luggage was delivered, the employee told his supervisor. The supervisor apologized to the guest and wrote on the hotel computer that this guest had had a problem and should receive exceptional service for the rest of his stay. This seems like a reasonable way to deal with the problem, but it really is an extraordinary case. In a hotel with a conventional organizational structure, if an employee makes a mistake, you expect your supervisor to never find out and may even try to cover up the matter. Employees know that if their supervisor learns of the error, they will receive a reprimand. The RitzCarlton hotel has a culture of service: it has turned the company's structure upside down. The bellhop was worried about the guest and knew the supervisor would do something to allow the hotel to correct its mistake. The supervisor was not afraid to communicate the department's error to other departments. When the organization is turned around, everyone works to serve the guest. When you have a conventional organizational structure, everyone works to please the boss. Unexpected situations One advantage of a strong service culture is that it prepares staff to handle unexpected situations. An unexpected situation is a unique circumstance involving a guest and that employees usually face for the first time. The number of unexpected situations is so high that they cannot be mentioned in a manual or in training programs. The advantage of adopting a culture of service is that it gives employees the right attitude, knowledge, communication skills, and authority to deal with these operations. The ability to solve such situations distinguishes excellent tourism companies from mediocre ones. For example, one day a guest requested to check-out later, as he had scheduled a videoconference from the privacy of his room. Unfortunately, the hotel was full and the room was needed so that other guests could occupy it that afternoon. The hotel's policy manual would say that, in this situation, the guest would have to be asked for the room; but since in a culture of service you have the desire to serve

the client, the hotel manager offered to use the conference room at no cost. Although the executive intended to pay to use the lounge, the hotel did not accept it, because anyway that space was not going to be rented at that time, so it did not lose money either. On the recommendation of this executive, a room at that hotel was later occupied by a business consultant. That is, the word-of-mouth communication generated more revenue than what the hotel would have received if it had charged for the conference room. Employees with initiative and decisionmaking authority can easily handle unexpected situations. Management must be willing to give employees the authority to make decisions that will solve guests' problems. Management must show confidence in their ability to hire and train employees, trusting in the staff's ability to make decisions. Tourism companies that rely on rigid policies and procedures rather than motivated, welltrained and decision-making employees have little hope of having very high levels of satisfaction. Expressed in a better way: The success of the internal marketing concept rests fundamentally on direction. Lower-level employees cannot be expected to be customer-oriented if the management, which is at higher levels, does not have the same goal. Operationoriented managers, especially concerned about policies and procedures, often implemented without looking at the customer, undermine the company's internal marketing effort, reducing employee tasks to mechanical functions that encourage, challenge or gratification of staff. In addition, by requiring employees to rigidly adhere to specific procedures, the operations-oriented manager tied their hands and restricted their ability to satisfy the customer. Managing unexpected or non-routine situations will become increasingly important in the future. Tourism companies are now using technology to service routine customer operations. This use of technology will become even more widespread. Checking in the hotel by means of a computerized machine, by video or through robots will be something widely used in the tourism sector; so that more and more employees will encounter non-routine tasks. Customers will have the advantage of using technology designed to increase and improve service more reliably while customers with problems will be able to deal with an employee. As the workplace is more automated, employees will have a greater role in answering questions and solving customer problems but must also be prepared to resolve unexpected situations. As Professor Parasuraman points out, "customer service obtained from successfully carried out activities can be seriously affected when a failure is made in the execution of a non-routine activity. No number of written procedures, guides or instructions can prevent such failures from occurring, except for a genuine dedication to customer satisfaction at the organizativor» level. A strong service culture allows employees to make decisions necessary to solve non-routine tasks. Adaptation of the concept of marketing to human resources management Create jobs that attract candidates with the right profile

Managers should use marketing principles to attract and retain employees. They must research and understand the needs of their employees, just as they examine the needs of customers. Not all employees are the same; some are looking for money to supplement their income and others are looking for that job that will be the only source of their income. Marketers can use research techniques to segment the labor market, selecting the best segments for the company and developing a marketing mix to attract those segments. For employees, the marketing mix includes work, pay, benefits, workplace, transportation, parking, hours per day, and non-tangible rewards such as prestige and opportunities for progress. Just as customers look for different attributes when they buy a product, employees pursue different benefits. Some are attracted to flexible working hours, others to the benefits of social insurance and some may even be attracted to childcare facilities. Flexible working hours for domestic or office work, a café or a nursery can be used to attract certain types of employees. Advertisements should be developed with future employees in mind, presenting a positive image of the company to present and future employees and customers. Employees are the ones who choose or leave the employer in the same way that customers select certain hotels and then decide to leave them. It is expensive to lose both guests and employees. Using marketing tools to maintain and improve vacancies and provide benefits for workers helps attract and retain good employees. A reduction in staff turnover rates can mean hundreds of thousands of euros in savings. The hiring process The value of service is, at least in part, the attitude the employee displays when offering a service experience. It is unlikely that the service provider will be able to teach the service attitude that all employees need when contacting customers. Service companies need two processes: the hiring process, to look for attitude, and the training process, to develop the technique. "Service characteristics, such as intangibility and customer contact, require service employees to show more initiative, cope with pressure more effectively to be more sensitive and flexible in the relationship with others, and to be more collaborative than employees working in the production of goods." This idea means that service companies place more emphasis on personality, energy or attitude than on studies, training and experience within their recruitment, selection and training strategies. Finding employees who are good at managing the service is a vital goal and the main hiring criteria for service companies. Staff selection for customer service roles is similar to casting for roles in a film. First, both require skillful performances in line with audience expectations. Creating an interpersonal experience that clients remember as satisfying, enjoyable or dazzling resembles an actor's mission to get an audience so involved in the play or film that they come to believe that the performer is the person represented. Secondly, a casting choice based on personality is required in both cases.

This supports the need to establish careful selection processes in tourism companies. Staff turnover rates of one hundred percent or more are common in the tourism sector. For example, fast food restaurants have a staff turnover of 123% while table service restaurants have a turnover of 88% for hourly employees. In companies with a lot of staff movement, managers tend to devote very little effort to hiring; they simply fill gaps in the schedules. Disney World allows its best employees, its "star collaborators," to choose future employees. Disney gives three weeks of training to the star collaborators who will participate in the selection process. They then conduct a 45-minute interview to select potential new employees. James Poisant, a former director of Disney World, explains that employees choose other employees who reflect their own values. "In 45 minutes the star members detect who is lying and who is sincere." Danny Meyer, author of the book Setting the Table, sums up the essence of hiring in the tourism sector by pointing out that people with their own technical skills are sought but, more importantly, people who also have emotional skills. Emotional skills include warmth, optimism, or curiosity to learn new things coupled with intelligence to learn, as well as work ethic that includes attention to detail, empathy, self-awareness, and integrity. Some selection methods that identify customer-oriented candidates should be used as part of the hiring process. The employee's attitude, appearance and willingness to respond to customer requests help to get a first impression. An effective internal marketing program requires close cooperation between human resources management and marketing management. Hiring and training, traditionally the responsibility of human resources management are key areas in any internal marketing program. The adaptation of the marketing philosophy to the direction of human resources, begins with the hiring of the right employees. Teamwork Employees who are not customer-oriented often de...