THE EFFECT OF INTERNAL MARKETING APPLICATIONS ON THE PERFORMANCE OF ETNTERPRISES AND PRIVATE-STATE HOSPITAL CORPARISON

Yıl 2013, Cilt: 13 Sayı: 25, 223 - 248, 01.06.2013

Zührem Ergün

Öz

The need of global competitiveness, which the today’s organizations meet as an
important advantage as well as a relative disadvantage in the struggle for existence of
today’s organizations, force the service based businesses to adaptation and change as well
as other businesses for being in global competition. A widely used expression by the
people in the community, which is "customer is our benefactor", stresses, that the
importance of customers value comes from very old times. In the competitive
environments, which are increasing in recent years, for companies, that presents and
produces similar products for similar prices and quality, is the customer satisfaction
comes as first of distinguishing features. The most important requirement to survive in the
ever increasing competitive markets is to capture the customer point of view of the
production of products and services and to provide customer satisfaction with producing
products and services according to customer requirements. The point to consider of
providing customer satisfaction is to satisfy internal customers, and to provide best quality
service to external customers by making the internal customers as loyal employees.
The rapid progress in the service sector over the past few years indicates the
importance attached to the issue of service within the sector. Business enterprises make
use of a variety of service in an effort to adapt themselves to the ever-changing and
developing circumstances.
In the business environment, which earns different dimensions with changing time
and values, the structures of customers also shows differences. By considering the
possibility of the person performing the purchase, in the situation of people, which are
going through to the adoption step after the purchase step, whom requirements are met, to
become a regular shopper of the same product, businesses continues their activity by
adopting the concept of “I sell what is required by people“ instead of” I sell what I
produce”. Also in the service industry, which highlights the human factor, to stand out
this idea depends on the satisfaction of employee in terms of morale and finance, by
responding their met and needs, and by providing them a comfortable and safety place to
work. Ensuring the satisfaction of the employees within the organization provides to
create a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Because any problem, which likely to
occur by processes in the business, could affect the service, which is being offered to
customers, businesses should keep in mind, that the employees are very important factor,
by considering their own processes at first.
The idea of overlooking the human factor, in terms of to targeting the success in an
increasingly competitive environment for businesses, is accepted in work life especially in
recent years and this idea take place in the basic elements of organizational culture such
as mission and vision. At this point, the concept of the customer is defined in the business
as internal and external customers and all business activities focus on this two important
concepts, and have begun to show the efforts, which needed to be close to them.
In the marketing of internal marketing services, which began to take place in the
literature in the 1980’s, emphasizes the importance of the employees. The internal
marketing, which qualify the employees as customers, by giving the same importance to
customers and the employees, helps to provide customer satisfaction by employee
satisfaction. Due to sectoral differences, changes in services differ from Sector to Sector. As in
every other field, there is an increasing demand in the field of health organizations. The
importance of internal marketing approach is also increasing in health organizations and
its impact on the Performance of employees cannot be disregarded.
The internal marketing, which is one of the modern marketing approaches, have an
important role in terms of implementation in service businesses. In this regard, with result
of employee satisfaction and later with customers satisfaction, the occur of applications to
increase business performance comes into being. The increasing of business performance
can be achieved in hospital businesses just like in all other service sectors, by providing
the satisfaction of internal and external customers in the scope of internal marketing. Two
basic idea exists under internal marketing concept. Everyone in the organization have a
customer and internal customers should be happy in their work for to transport of more
effective service to the final customer.
There are some important concepts, which needs to carefully emphasize by
management such as communications, technology, culture, socialization, orientation,
relationship of employee and customer satisfaction for applying the concept of internal
marketing, which aims to increase the customer satisfaction by increasing the employee
satisfaction.
With internal marketing, the commitment of employees to business is increased and
the working force turnover decreases, and there are also savings about recruitment,
training costs, defective product / service delivery and so on. The resources, which are
used for the recruitment of new employees, and training of them could be utilized to
achieve the goals such as to develop the skills of existing employees. Also, the decline in
the rate of severance leads to less stress by existing employees.
As well as the concepts of business, perceptions about the workers in service
enterprises, which are in direct contact with the customer, should be considered as an
important factor, which determines the customer satisfaction. In service businesses, the
employees are in the position, where the connection between the customers and service
providers is established. The employees, which have a huge contact with customers,
directly affects the business, how it is perceived by the customer. Under the concept of
internal marketing, which is a strategy to sharp the business products as to fit the needs of
people and a philosophy that employees are treated as customers, lies two basic idea. Two
basic idea exists under internal marketing concept. Everyone in the organization have a
customer and internal customers should be happy in their work for to transport of more
effective service to the final customer. Internal marketing is a planned and similar to
marketing effort, which is applied to combine employees for effective implementation of
common and operational strategies, to coordinate them functionally and to defeat the
resistance to change for achieving customer satisfaction through creation progress of
motivated and customer focused employees. With internal marketing, the company can
target to achieve external customer satisfaction by organizing the business activities by
the satisfaction of both internal and external customers, by housing the capable staff for
achieving ultimate company mission and by using all their employees internal
communication and other motivating elements. The most important objective of the
internal marketing is to plan and establish close and flexible relationships according to
employees, for continuously improving their internal processes. In order to maintain
business existence, businesses should gain customers, satisfy them, provide the
satisfaction, and expenditure all effort to keep the customer. For providing a better service to customers, the training and developing of all employees, the correct orientation,
supervision and motivation is very necessary. Because, when the personnel, which offers
products or service and have direct contact with customers, is good in human relations,
well trained and experienced, the personnel becomes the enterprise's core strength with
customer satisfaction. Internal marketing approaches all employees and all departments
within the company as internal customer and analyzes the employees and departments
with in the company as internal provider. The basic assumption of this approach is to
increase the quality of the sevices, which offered to external customers, by increasing the
quality of service businesses with internal customers, and because of this, by adding the
issue of customer satisfaction to the pointed assumption, the businesses provides
emphasizing the importance of issues such as the training, which will provides employees
satisfaction, compensation, communication.
This paper examines the effects of internal marketing applications on hospital
performances. A twofold research to reveal the relation between internal marketing and
hospital performance was designed and conducted on hospitals. In the first stage, a
research was conducted in order to provide a better understanding of the concept and its
basic elements. In the second stage, on the other hand, comprised the internal marketing
diversity scale, developed by Ahmed, Rafiq, Saad (2003), as well as a hypothesis
frequency Analysis and a Research that used simple regression Analysis methods.
According to results of our research, there is a significant and positive correlation between
the components of internal marketing and hospital performance. This situation provides a
positive contribution to hospital performance by providing the hospital managers with
aware of needs to give the importance, that given to foreign employees, to employees,
which defined as internal customers.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Service Sector, Internal Marketing, Hospital Performance

İÇSEL PAZARLAMA UYGULAMALARININ İŞLETME PERFORMANSI ÜZERİNE ETKİSİ: KAMU-ÖZEL HASTANE KARŞILAŞTIRMASI

Öz

Son yıllarda hizmet sektöründeki hızlı gelişmeler, sektör içinde hizmet konusuna verilen önemin bir göstergesidir. İşletmeler sürekli olarak değişen ve gelişen çevre koşullarına uyum sağlayabilmek konusunda çeşitli hizmetlerden yararlanmaktadır. Sektörel farklılık nedeniyle, hizmetlerde sektörlere göre değişim göstermektedir. Her alanda hizmete olan talep gibi, sağlık kuruluşları alanında da giderek artan bir talep söz konusudur. Sağlık kuruluşlarında da önemi giderek artan hizmetin içsel pazarlama yaklaşımıyla çalışanların performansı üzerinde de etkileri yadsınamayacak durumdadır. Bu çalışma, içsel pazarlama uygulamalarının hastane performansı üzerine etkisini inceleyen bir araştırmadır. İçsel pazarlamanın hastane performansı üzerine etkisini incelemek için iki aşamalı bir araştırma tasarlanmış ve hastaneler üzerinde uygulanmıştır. İlk aşamada kavramın ve kavrama yönelik unsurların daha iyi anlaşılabilmesi için keşfedici bir araştırma yürütülmüştür. İkinci aşamada ise, Ahmed, Rafiq, Saad (2003) tarafından geliştirilmiş olan içsel pazarlama karması ölçeği ile hipotezler frekans analizi ve basit regresyon analizi yöntemleri ile araştırma yapılmıştır. Araştırma sonuçlarına göre, içsel pazarlama bileşenleri ve hastane performansı arasında anlamlı ve pozitif yönlü bir ilişki bulunmaktadır. Bu durum hastane yöneticilerinin dış müşterilere verilen önemin içsel müşteri olarak tanımlanan çalışanlara da verilmesi gerektiğinin bilincinde olmalarını sağlarak hastanenin performansını artırmasına da yardımcı olur.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Hizmet Sektörü, İçsel Pazarlama, Hastane Performansı