This research seeks to investigate the relationship between satisfaction of internal customer and its influence on the service quality as well as satisfaction of external customer. Along with a rapid growth in the service industry, coffee market is one of the fast-growing domestic business in recent Korea.
Meanwhile, there are great demands to create a ‘human-based’ management throughout the mutual relationship of the members of the company to acquire and generate the profit for the company.
This is due to the properties of the service industry where the employee (internal customer) is always the first to deal with the customer’s demands. However, there are hardly any research or case study been reported yet addressing the important relation of this issue. By thoroughly investigating the satisfaction of internal customer, it will provide an insight to a new set of implications that can be implemented; not only having internal customers considered as the ‘workers’ (employees) but a strategic value.
Survey questions were made for both internal and external customers with preceding research as a basis, all of the selected participants were restricted to either the providing group or as the offered group. The analysis was done by using the SmartPLS2.0 system; working out the median value to balance out the used data standards. According to the analysis, it appeared to be the satisfaction of internal customer had a positive influence on service quality and satisfaction of the external customer. Though it was also noticeable that the certain types of service quality and assurance did not have any direct effect or influence on fulfilling the satisfaction of the external customer.
Considering how most coffee specialty shops are large franchise businesses and with many employees as part-time workers; it was evident that customers did not consider the professionalism of the employees nor the physical scale of the business. These results show that when companies start to invest more to enhance the satisfaction levels of internal customers as well as maintaining their traditions of business strategy will offer a better service quality to all external customers. To conclude, this means the company must start seeking for improvements in order to create a better source of profit in future to come.