QUESTIONARIRE

Questionnaire



Questionnaire

Discussion of study findings

This paper has identified two empirically derived measures of customer satisfaction at Tesco super market.

(1)personal service; and

(2)technical competence.

When those in the focal groups were asked to estimate how their internal customers would rate them on the two measures derived in this study, their estimates were significantly higher than the actual ratings attributed to them by their internal customers. Thus, their perceptions were distorted.

The ratings from most work teams (focal units) tended to estimate the collective level of internal service quality provided by them to be higher than how they were actually rated by their internal customers. Thus, the self-assessments of internal work teams by those working in them was distorted when compared with the perceptions of their actual performance by their internal customers. Thus, if generalized, the data suggest that individuals in work teams may be relying on assumptions that their own work units are serving their internal customers acceptably, when, in fact, they are not providing the services and products needed by their internal customers to carry out their own work assignments as part of the service-profit chain. As a result, eventual breaks in the service-profit chain and failed service to the organization's external customer occur.

Implications for practitioners

Based on this discrepancy in performance ratings between focal units and their internal customers, any or all of the following might be initiated within the organization to help close the gap between members of work teams serving internal customers and how their internal customers actually rate them:

Create objective output measures of the service quality of work teams (focal groups). These measures need to be credible and deemed valid by those being measured.

Use these measures to evaluate the performance of work teams.

Expose the work teams to such data once obtained so the members of these teams can learn and find ways to improve their performance.

Compare the self-ratings of work team members with the ratings of their internal customers to identify areas where distortion is most prevalent, and then identify the contributing factors relating to such discrepancies.

Temporarily assign employees to their internal customer groups so they may gain greater understanding of their own focal groups' performance from the perspective of their internal customers.

Craft new means to identify organizational barriers that contribute to failed internal customer service and then develop responsive means to eliminate them once they are identified.

Enable internal customers to have more realistic expectations of their internal suppliers.

Summary

The purpose of this paper was to identify generic measures that can be used to assess internal customer support by work teams. A comparison of perceptions of those who actually perform the work and those who are their internal customers revealed a perceptual bias among those being evaluated, where the subjects of the evaluation viewed themselves to be performing more effectively than did their internal customers.

The findings are consistent with research in perceptual distortion and self-rating bias and further supports the need for internal customer service ...