Service quality between internal customers and internal suppliers in an international airline

Over the past decade, SERVQUAL has emerged as perhaps the most popular standardized questionnaire to measure service quality. In this study, a conceptual model, INTSERVQUAL, was designed based on the original “Gap Model”, to explore the extent to which the construct service quality plays in an internal marketing setting. The research was conducted in a major international airline. The expectations and perceptions scales have emerged as measures with excellent internal consistency reliabilities. The two scales exhibited adequate validity as separate measures of front-line staff (customer-contact personnel) expectations of support services; and their perceptions of the support staff’s performance. The results indicated that the scales can be successfully used to assess the magnitude of the gap between front-line staff perceptions and expectations.