Investigating the impact of internal marketing on student satisfaction with mediation of employees ' job satisfaction and service quality.

In recent years, higher education has faced dramatic changes in line with the changes in the environment. Among others, these changes include an increase in abroad higher education, more intense competition for scarce resources, and a growth in the number of universities and institutes offering these services. As a result, these institutes, like many other service organizations, need to not only pay attention to their employees’ satisfaction but also try to identify their students’ expectations and needs and offer quality services to them. Thus, the necessity of customer orientation and improvement of services quality at universities and higher education institutes has highlighted the importance of conducting research in this field. The objective of this study is the assessment of students’ satisfaction driven from internal customers and services quality. To this end, questionnaires were administered to 43 educational departments of University of Guilan (consisting of 375 students, 208 faculty members, and 86 education employees). The data were analyzed with SPSS 19 and Smart PLS 2. The results show that internal marketing directly and indirectly affects the satisfaction of the students by the mediation of both the service quality and job satisfaction of employees and faculty members.