Huffman Trucking Scenario

The Huffman Trucking scenario highlights two issues that other companies have also faced-the need for an internal marketing program and the need for a customer-centric culture. Huffman's CEO rightly determined that the company needed to put the customer at the center of all of its business decisions and create an internal marketing culture to support customer service. Two companies whose experience reflects these issues are Hampton Inn and Ito-Yokado.

Hampton Inn decided, as Huffman Trucking did, that it wanted to develop an internal marketing program across its chain of hotels. The company wanted employees to be empowered to deliver superior customer service to its customers at every point in a customer's stay. Since the typical customer encounters a variety of Hampton Inn employees during the course of a stay, this meant that the internal marketing program had to ensure that every employee in the organization, regardless of position, needed to be reached with the internal marketing program's message and empowered to take the appropriate action with respect to customer service.

The internal marketing program emphasized that "Every employee in every position at nearly 1,300 Hampton Inn percent unconditional satisfaction service guarantee" consisting of a free night's stay, no manager approval needed (Drake, Gulman, & Roberts, 2005, p. 22). The underlying message of the internal marketing program was that every employee was responsible for deliver

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ecognized that they just needed to be milked (Drake, Gulman, & Roberts, 2005, p. 15). The truck driver knew nothing about how to milk a cow, so the breakfast hostess went outside and milked the cows for him; although her "job description certainly didn't include milking cows...that was an unimportant detail to her. She understood that her job was to take care of guests" (Drake, Gulman, & Roberts, 2005, p. 15). Huffman Trucking is also interested in creating a customer-centric culture. For this, it can learn from Ito-Yokado, Japan's largest retailer and the operator of the Seven-Eleven convenience store chain in Japan ("The Customer-Centric Store," n.d., p. 8). All convenience stores provide convenience, but Ito-Yokado wanted to increase the convenience of its customers. Seven-Eleven Japan "recognize[d] that its customers were becoming increasingly pressed for time and needed to be able to shop at all hours" ("The Customer-Centric Store," n.d., p. 8). It also recognized that customers had other convenience needs that were not being met by typical convenience stores, such as the need for differentiated services like bill payment and bank account access ("The Customer-Centric Store," n.d., p. 8). To address the

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