Marketers’ expanded role to increase internal customer satisfaction in organizational change

Abstract

Abstract During times of change, when companies are going through major transformations like mergers, acquisitions, organizational re-structuring or culture change, marketing faces the challenge to implement the new strategy as scheduled, with no delays or changes. Internal customer change acceptance plays a significant role in this endeavor and marketers need to expand their role and complement Human Resources strategy to building trust between decision makers and employees, to learn and understand past issues and to find solutions. In this circumstance, marketers’ have to identify the variables that generally influence internal customer satisfaction and develop them in marketing tools aimed to increase it to the level that strategy is accepted and implemented faster than using only Human Resources mechanisms. This paper is a result of marketing practice in medium and large companies that went through organizational change. The goal of this case study is to create, based on time, discipline and cross-functional skills variables, a model of efficient processes and evaluation of marketing actions that will increase employees’ trust in change management decisions and will lead to their support and engagement. The three independent variables allowed researcher to study the complex relationship between internal client satisfaction phenomena, organizational change context and thirty-six cross-functional employees including management, ultimately to answer how these variables can be used by marketers to get the internal customer change buy-in. The research showed that the new developed marketing tools, that is to say a process flow associated with sustainable procedures and Service Level Agreements, increased internal customer satisfaction and contributed to smooth and consistent marketing strategy implementation, as scheduled. This result means the theory that marketers role in times of organizational change, besides regular Key Performance Indicators regarding the external client, expanded to complement Human Resources towards increasing internal customer satisfaction, determines a faster change acceptance, was validated.