Customer Service: Who Is Your Customer?

Customer Service is easier to comprehend if we believe that the universal concept of good manners should also be considered common business sense.

When you look at it, organizations are made up of people.

Ultimately, the Customer even if your business documents say it's a corporation will always end up being a human being.

Have you ever seen a corporation as a machine?

We must therefore understand what we are really offering. We must know who are we doing all these for.

Who Is Your Customer?

When identifying Customers from the Customer Service perspective, you are only looking at two (2) major kinds: Internal and External Customers.

People in your organization who need your products or services to get their jobs done are your Internal Customers.

On the other hand, people or organizations outside yours who require and buy your product or service to satisfy a need or solve a problem are your External Customers.

You need to know the distinction between the two for purposes of managing processes and measuring results.

Both require respective Customer satisfaction metrics in some way to measure the quality of service or product delivery.

Your concern for Internal Customers is cost-driven while for External Customers it is revenue and profit-margin-driven.

The approaches to communication and service delivery will be different.

The proximity of Internal Customers to you makes it relatively easy to deliver Internal Customer service.

External Customers however will require different media or channels to communicate to you.

You will have no way to determine where your External Customers are, physically and in mind, at any given moment to specifically trigger communication.

If you are working for a retailing organization selling microcomputers and their accessories and providing maintenance service, you will have Internal and External Customers.

Your Accounting Department may have people who will be using PCs that will need your maintenance service.

It will be quite odd to tell accounting to go call your competitor for the service you already have in-house.

Your External Customer may be a company, individual or any organization using PCs that may need your services.

The quality of the delivery and the constitution of "good" Customer Service is hinged on the expectations of that Customer and the execution of the service.

Beyond the measurable results, the quality of the service or product is really based on how close we are to meeting and satisfying customer expectations.