Quality of Work/Life and Service Quality

The chapter focuses on how service quality can be improved by helping the internal customers to improve/enhance the quality of their work/life. Employees play a very significant role in service delivery. To achieve any kind of success in service improvements/innovations the role of employees assumes great significance. It is increasingly being accepted that the nature of services makes them intangible, perishable, heterogeneous, and inseparable. This puts the responsibility of delivering value to the customers on the employees who are directly interacting with them. The competence and attitude of the employee who is the “internal customer” and delivers the services to the external customer is of paramount importance. Service delivery is increasingly becoming the anchor stone due to increase in intensity of competition in the services sector. Since it is the employee who alone can provide this differentiating competitive edge, it is important to understand those factors that operate in an internal customer's work and life and can impact his delivery in the service sector. This chapter seeks to explore the relationship between the quality of work/life of the “internal customer” and the quality of services delivered to the “external customer.”