trained, empowered staff, who take prompt action to resolve a
problem, may even raise the customer’s perception of service
quality.^38 Bowen and Lawler have also argued that empowerment
can improve employee motivation and job satisfaction, which can in
turn improve customer satisfaction and retention.^37 The benefits of
empowerment must, however, be balanced with the increased
labour, recruitment and training costs and as such should be viewed
as a long-term investment in employees. There is also the issue of
ensuring that all customers are treated alike, otherwise resentment
may result if customers perceive that a particular customer is receiv-
ing special treatment. Bowen and Lawler caution that empower-
ment may not necessarily be the best choice for some companies
and recommend that managers should assess the pros and cons of
empowerment for their business before launching into a full-blown
empowerment strategy.^37
Developing internal marketing relationships
It is suggested that the basic philosophy of internal marketing,
which has led to numerous writings on the subject, is basically
sound: the idea of developing and maintaining an internal service
culture and orientation; the notion of the internal customer and the
part-time marketer; the role that employee satisfaction and retention
plays in determining external customer satisfaction and retention.
These all contribute to a greater understanding of the concepts of
internal marketing and how it impacts on corporate performance.
The difficulties of applying traditional marketing concepts to the
internal market have already been discussed, as have some of the
pitfalls of adopting a functional approach and defining the bound-
ary of internal marketing. To date, however, there is still no consen-
sus on the implementation of internal marketing. What is clear is
that internal marketing should not be solely the domain of mar-
keters applying traditional marketing concepts and tools. To do this
would destroy the very nature of what is meant by relationship
marketing and would not take into account the needs of the internal
market. The model of internal marketing as proposed by Varey^35
(Figure 5.3) as a process or mechanism for integrated market-ori-
ented management would seem to offer the most in terms of
enhancing the organization’s capability. Further work, however,
needs to be undertaken to empirically test this model with organi-
The recruitment and internal market domains 323