Customers are more important than internal customers
I have hear it suggested that:
- internal customers are as important as external customers.
- customer service lessons about customers can be related to internal customers
- good internal customer service means that overall customer service will improve
- meeting internal SLAs means that customers will be satisfied
- many other variants of internal customers=external customers
And I disagree for the simple reason that it is untrue.
External customers have a business need (or want) that your company satisfies. They are the people to whom value is provided, around whom your process needs to be oriented, whose satisfaction matters.
Sometimes you need something from another team, department or colleague in order to satisfy a customer. You can rightly ask for it, and expect to receive it. This is different to being a customer – this is being a colleague who needs help to satisfy a customer.
If your role is to satisfy another team – you should still know how your activity fits into the overall provision of the service to the customer, and be doing what is needed to satisfy the actual customer. The role is part of a process that satisfies a customer.
Many people have a role which is about an internal customer and you can easily lose sight of the customer – and in this case your internal customer can be confused as a proxy for the external customer. You should resist this – it is a simplification which has a whole bunch of hazards, such as objective shift, political point-scoring, losing touch with what is important. We really should resist over-simplification where it makes things harder – as Einstein said “make things as simple as they can be and no simpler”.
From somebody wanting extra attention it is sometimes heard from an internal customer “I am your customer and I want/need…” but it simply is untrue – perhaps this means “Our customer wants/needs…” or perhaps, “In order for me to do… for customers I need…” even when you call your internal IT help desk.
The simplification hides the truth, the customer is the customer. Internal customers are internal customer – essentially a proper noun. Customer service is inherently tied to something of value provided by an organisation. I know I used to confuse these things when I was younger and less experienced – now I know better.
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