Quote on Internal Customer Service – Jan Carlzon
A group of people, often overlooked by many customer service representatives and employees in organizations, are the “internal customers.” These are the peers, supervisors, and fellow employees throughout an organization. In many instances, these folks are in support positions in departments that are served by others in the organization.
Internal customers are people to whom and from whom you provide or receive information, products, and services. These might be people you depend on to get the information needed to complete your monthly reports or who depend upon you to provide materials or data for them to do their jobs.
The key to providing professional internal service is for everyone in the organization to adopt a customer-centric approach to interactions with other employees. Requests for information, products, and services should be viewed as just as important as those received from external customers in any situation. The only exceptions would be if there is an external customer waiting for service. In such instances, you should professionally inform your internal customer of that fact, provide service to the external customer and then get back to your internal customer in a timely fashion.
Jan Carlzon, former CEO of SAS Group famously made the following statement regarding internal customer service:
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In my book Customer Service Skills for Success, I define customer service as “the ability of knowledgeable, capable, and enthusiastic employees to deliver products and services to their internal and external customers in a manner that satisfies identified and unidentified needs and ultimately results in positive word-of-mouth publicity and return business.”