Internal Service Quality
Internal service quality constitutes the link between employee surveys and customer satisfaction studies. By measuring internal service quality, one can describe how well the individual departments of a company are working together. In the best-case scenario, this functions smoothly - be it in terms of direct customer requests, product launches, or other information that different departments need to fulfil their tasks.
However, reality demonstrates that internal service frequently leaves much to be desired. This often leads to misunderstandings, inefficient procedures, and delayed processes. This not only has a negative effect on staff productivity, but on customer orientation too.
A holistic examination of customer satisfaction, employee commitment, and internal service quality allows one to precisely identify many causes of low commitment on the part of individual departments or below-average customer satisfaction scores.
The respective interfaces and interdepartmental processes can subsequently be improved and coordinated, thereby creating comprehensive quality management throughout the in-company value-added chain. This not only increases productivity, but noticeably reduces costs at the same time. Improved operational processes simultaneously increase staff performance. Customers also benefit from good internal service quality: staff are committed, and their issue is quickly and smoothly resolved.
The Distinction between Staff Performance and Process Quality
In order to obtain meaningful results and accurately improve internal service quality, it's important to adopt a holistic perspective. Ultimately it's
not just about individual contact within interdepartmental collaboration, but more profound processes too. This is why it's important that surveys
should make a distinction between these two aspects (staff performance and process quality) by using cleverly devised questions.
However, one should go one step further here and only get individual employees to rate those aspects about which they can actually give a reliable verdict. Thus, for example, not every employee uses the services of a department with which they have personal contact. The same naturally applies the other way round: there doesn't have to be any personal contact with every department whose services are regularly used. For example, this is the case with internal newsletters and the like. It therefore doesn't make sense to ask employees who don't have any personal contact with a given department about the friendliness and competence of the colleagues who work there. Conversely, one is equally unlikely to obtain reliable results if staff are meant to rate processes that they've never used before, simply because they maintain a personal relationship with this department.
Analysis of Actual Working Relationships
This means that questions asking people to rate internal service quality must in each case be allocated to respondents in line with the nature of the respective working relationship. In terms of further analysis, it's also important to see how intensive the contact with this department and/or the use of its services actually is. All of this can be recorded via an index which, for example, initially measures the usage and contact intensity of the individual working relationships.
However, this not only allows one to allocate subsequent questions about staff performance or process quality. Instead, this procedure has above all proved its worth in determining which employees should rate which department. An index-based procedure of this kind that is driven by real time enjoys an extremely crucial advantage over other methods: it is based upon actual internal customer-service provider relationships and this provides undistorted results. For example, these relationships cannot be reliably illustrated by using an organigram - the web of internal relationships is simply too complex for this.
However, methods whereby every employee in a department is meant to accurately rate the other departments or where they themselves can decide who they want to rate are often problematic in practice. In the first case, this is down to the fact that the individual employees in a department mostly collaborate with totally different internal contact people and departments. By contrast, in the second case where employees themselves choose which departments to rate, there's a risk that they only rate those departments with which they have the closest relationship. However, this means that departments with lesser 'service flows' often fail to generate an adequate number of ratings that would allow one to conduct meaningful analyses. This problem can be avoided by using an index-based procedure, because one can ensure that every department receives enough ratings.
Based upon these ratings, a driver analysis can be employed to identify immediate need for improvement plus levers for action, thereby leading to the necessary initiatives that must be implemented. Follow-up studies can check the extent to which these initiatives have actually been implemented and how successful they've been. Powerful online reporting solutions are an ideal way of tracking internal service quality and how it changes over time. One thus obtains an ongoing internal feedback system that makes a vital contribution to increasing the company's productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness.