It is the view of banks’ senior management that the image of the ‘internal customer’
helps fostering a service mentality by encouraging individual employees to focus
on delivering high service quality in their internal service encounters. By making
the image of ‘internal customer’ central to the way in which employees perceive
themselves and one another, senior management aim to achieve internal customer
satisfaction as a prerequisite for external customer satisfaction. Gummesson (2000)
suggests that it has become established in the quality management literature that
employees are internal customers and that the ability of an employee to satisfy the
needs of others inside the firm is a precondition for external customer satisfaction.