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Susan Auty and George Long: Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, UK
Introduction
Bateson (1989) suggests that service encounters are a three-way fight between the firm, the contact personnel and the customer. The service encounter is thus a "compromise between partially conflicting parties". At the same time parallels between external and internal service delivery have frequently been suggested (Berry, 1981; Christopher et al., 1991; Heskett, 1995; Heskett et al., 1994; Vandermerwe and Gilbert, 1989), and Gummesson (1991) has specifically referred to the "tribal warfare" where loyalty is to the internal department and not to the organization as a whole. Such partisanship is likely to have an effect on internal service quality. In this paper we look at internal service quality, making use of the gap analysis proposed by Parasuraman et al. (1985, 1988) to explore the causes of disappointing internal service quality (Gaps 1-4) and the effect of tribal warfare (manifested in Gap 5).
Attempts have been made to apply external service quality dimensions to the measurement of internal service quality (Chaston, 1994, 1995; Gremler et al., 1994; Nagel and Cilliers, 1990; Pitt et al., 1995; Reynoso and Moores, 1996, 1997; Varey, 1995). The justification for the use of an external model which is most frequently advanced by these authors is that the interaction between the company and the customer is simply one link in a large network of relationships, many of which occur within the boundaries of the company. The implication is that the principles and techniques for the creation and measurement of service quality can be transferred to the internal environment.
In making the analogies between internal and external services authors have rarely addressed the extent to which these are appropriate. In a parallel field de Burca (1995) counsels caution when adopting this approach, pointing out the problems in a situation where consumer marketing practices and ideas were applied to business to business marketing without acknowledging fundamental differences between the two fields of application. Reynoso and Moores (1996) also partially acknowledge this issue in their conclusion where they note that their work "could well constitute the basis for a whole series of projects conducted in other service environments ... such a body of research (would) provide further insights into the concept of the internal...