"It just takes a lot of effort to get things done."
A friend recently shared these frustrations. She had worked in sales at her company for the past six years. It had a good product and she was successful, but something was gnawing at her.
My friend explained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to hit her sales targets. The challenge wasn't a new competitor, shifting market conditions, or even the pandemic.
The biggest issue was a lack of internal customer service.
My friend increasingly spent time and effort navigating corporate bureaucracy, waiting for results, and following-up with other departments to make sure they didn't drop the ball.
"I'm not looking right now," she said, "but I'd jump at the opportunity to leave if the right offer came along."
Poor internal customer service frustrates many employees like my friend. This post will answer three critical questions:
What is internal customer service?
Why is it important?
How can you make it better?
What is internal customer service?
Most people think of a customer as someone who buys our products and services.
Customer-focused organizations tend to define "customer" more broadly. A customer to these organizations is anyone we serve.
So an internal customer can be defined this way:
An internal customer is anyone we serve inside our own organization.
This can include several groups of coworkers:
People on your team
Your boss
People in other departments
You can also broaden it to include contractors, vendors, and other third-parties you work closely with to get your job done and ultimately serve your external customers.
Internal customers often have a few common characteristics when compared to external customers:
Frequent interactions: we tend to serve the same people more often.
Close relationships: we form tighter bonds with the people we work with.
Two-way service: internal customers often serve each other.
These characteristics don't always hold true.
In some larger organizations, some departments serve thousands of internal customers and more closely resemble a traditional external customer service team.
Here are a few examples:
An IT help desk in a major retail chain keeps the computer systems running at over a thousand stores.
An employee relations contact center in a multinational company helps thousands of remote employees with their human resources needs.
The underwriting department in a credit union reviews loan applications submitted by loan officers at the credit union's branches.
This short video provides more information about who is an internal customer.
Why is internal customer service important?
My wife, Sally, and I recently checked into a non-smoking hotel room that reeked of cigarette smoke. We had to trudge downstairs to the front desk to request another room.
It's clear we experienced a service failure, but what about the front desk employee who checked us in?
He experienced an internal service failure.
The employee relied on a colleague in the hotel's housekeeping department to verify the room was clean and available. Marking the room as clean despite the strong odor of cigarette smoke set the front desk employee up to fail.
We were patient and understanding, but many customers are not.
This creates a miserable experience for employees. Getting yelled at by customer after customer for mistakes that someone else made can make employees quickly re-evaluate whether they're in the right job.
External service failures aren't the only sign of a problem.
My friend in sales has managed to prevent any major issues so far, and her numbers still look good. But all the extra effort required to overcome poor internal customer service eventually wears thin.
How can you improve internal customer service?
Roughly 50 percent of my customer service training requests are for internal customer service. What I've learned over many years is the formula for improving both internal and external customer service is essentially the same.
First, you must define outstanding service so everyone is on the same page.
The best way to do this is to create a customer experience vision statement. You can follow my step-by-step guide to write your own.
Next, make sure every employee is aware of what a great customer experience looks like and how they play a role.
This includes employees who only provide internal customer service. No one in a customer-focused organization is exempt from service.
You can use this guide to engaging employees to get everyone on board.
Finally, remove the friction that makes it overly difficult for employees to serve each other at the highest level. You can get a few ideas here.
Conclusion
You can help your employees build their skills with my LinkedIn Learning course, Serving Internal Customers. Over 100,000 people around the world have taken the course so far.
It's available to all LinkedIn Learning subscribers. You can also view the course with a free, 30-day trial.
Here's a short preview.