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Zhou, Kaiyao (2019) Exploring online education management perceptions of internal marketing’s impact on service quality co-created value and satisfaction. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)]

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Abstract

With the rise of customer-centric marketing orientation, internal marketing has become an increasingly popular research topic in the academic community. Compared with external marketing, internal marketing attaches more importance to employees' multi-functional role in improving customer satisfaction. At the same time, customer value co-creation is also an added benefit of high-quality service for employees. Therefore, this paper focuses on answering the question of:

“How does a Chinese online education provider’s management perceptions of internal marketing impact on service quality co-created value and satisfaction?”

Education is a service industry requiring a high degree of value co-creation in order to offset its high level of intangibility. At the same time, China's online education market has shown significant growth. Therefore, the context of this study is Chinese online education providers aiming to analyze the transition dilemma of the education industry from traditional approaches to online approaches and give corresponding suggestions.

The author identified as a critical realist and therefore adopted a mixed-methods research design utilizing an exploratory sequential approach. However, due to time constraints, the author focused on the qualitative data collection and analysis research stages that will inform a future quantitative data collection and analysis and which will be completed later either by the author or other researchers. The qualitative methodology was a phenomenological study to understand the experience from the participants’ perception. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with four informants in a Chinese on-line education provider to reflect the various aspects of the experience by position and function.

The research results show that the application of internal marketing would help in narrowing down the gap between customer expectations of service and management perceptions of those customer expectations, and thus should lead to improvements in service quality and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, improvement of customer satisfaction should also lead to more customer engagement which in turn should see the co-creation of value with the company being achieved more actively. A future research agenda includes using the results from this qualitative study to guide hypothesis generation and testing of a controlled quantitative survey that provides guidance for the online transformation of traditional education providers in China.

Item Type:	Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Depositing User:	Zhou, Kaiyao
Date Deposited:	30 Nov 2022 11:05
Last Modified:	30 Nov 2022 11:05
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/57434

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