The Internal Customer

For many, the operational assumption about internal customers is that they know their jobs and provide their products and services to others in timely and quality manner.  If you hire good people the work gets done.  In today’s market place, that assumption must be challenged by ensuring that standards are clearly set, everyone knows the organization’s strategy, quality training is in place and process interference is at a minimum. 

Leading companies are moving to align employees and departments with the company strategy.  The balanced scorecard is one strategy being used to ensure this alignment.  Properly structured internal customer surveys provide the measures necessary to assure this alignment.  Even without a balanced scorecard process in place, organizations need to assess the effectiveness of their departments.

Administrative support departments such as finance, purchasing, IT and human resources are often not seen as critical to getting the product/service “out the door”.  They are in large part, a key provider of internal service that enables the production department to get their job done to satisfy the external customer.  There are many exchanges related to the product/service between these administrative departments and the production departments.  Every department has internal customers, not just support departments.  The effectiveness of this internal service is often the key to more effective external customer service.

Often the results of the external customer survey when compared to those of the internal customer service indicate gaps that need to be addressed.  The Kilgore Group can assist with analysis of the two surveys and provide feedback on strategies to improve effectiveness.

The Kilgore Group’s approach is to work with senior management to ensure clear understanding of company strategy and key goals.  From this information, surveys can be compiled from our database of questions that will ensure effective and targeted measurement of key indicators.  Both internal and external customer surveys are linked in their assessment of the key indicators.  Therefore, the results will identify strengths to build upon and gaps that need attention to create improvement.

Results of well constructed internal customer surveys correlate with external customer satisfaction.  This is also true in reverse.

Knowing the results of the surveys will enable senior management to reward those things that are going well and identify initiatives for closing the gaps identified.

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