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Customer satisfaction has dominated much of the recent service literature (Zemke, 1989; Heskett, 1990; Zeithaml, 1990, Berry; 1991). This literature suggests that to deliver high levels of customer satisfaction, organizations must identify, measure, and manage the internal elements that produce it. The first part of this paper identifies some of the elements within an organization hypothesized to affect customer satisfaction. We call these the eight components of internal service quality. By measuring these components, managers may be able to determine which actions are required to improve customer satisfaction. This knowledge may then enable managers to take a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to customer satisfaction. Internal service quality (defined for this purpose as employee satisfaction with the service received from internal service providers) has received little attention in the empirical literature, although certain aspects of it have been discussed theoretically as far back as Barnard (1938). Only in the past decade has it begun to be examined as a holistic concept. Yet internal service quality remains complex, in part because its composition can vary for different organizations at different times. In short, which internal services are important, and how important their quality is, depends on an organization's tasks and employees. Despite this variability, we believe (supported by the quality and service literatures) that internal service quality has basic components important to most organizations. This paper also explores the relationship between internal service quality and job satisfaction, one important indication of an organization's work environment. We propose that internal service quality is important because it relates to both customer satisfaction and job satisfaction. This dual relationship may begin to explain the observation that while job satisfaction may not lead to customer satisfaction directly, service firms rarely have satisfi [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]