Paul Tholen

I recently overheard a businessman use the phrase “we had to move him away from a customer-facing role.”

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I was curious to learn more about this, since I don’t happen to believe that such a move is actually possible. What was meant, of course, was that they had decided to keep this particular individual apart from paying customers because his attitude and personality was not particularly conducive to good customer relations. What they might not have thought about enough was that such a decision might only move the problem from one place to another.

Every business has two types of customer: external and internal. External customers are those people to whom the business provides goods or services in exchange for payment. They are, of course, vital to the organisation in that they provide the income the business needs to cover its costs and make a profit.

As I’ve written about many times before, providing the best possible customer service is crucial to business success because satisfied customers not only return, but often refer other new customers, thus helping to grow the business. Clearly, having employees with the right behaviour and motivation dealing with those customers is essential and moving someone who lacks those characteristics to another job might, on the face of it, seem sensible.

But that person will now find himself having to deal with other colleagues in the organisation. Most businesses have many more people working in jobs that don’t directly interface with paying customers than those whose role is to serve the customer face to face. Production, warehouse and distribution staff rarely, if ever, have dealings with the people who pay the bills, nor do those in departments like finance or IT or human resources. Members of the research and development, marketing and purchasing teams don’t often meet external customers, other than, perhaps, through events like consumer research panels. Yet every one of them has needs that have to be met by someone else within the business: in other words, they too are internal customers, and they too, in turn, provide services to their colleagues.

The flow of information around a business is critical to efficient operations and many people in the IT department, for example, will have jobs that are about providing that information in a timely and accurate manner to all of those fellow employees who need it to perform their functions. Others will have responsibilities for keeping the computers running properly so the information can be analysed and disseminated effectively. Both of these are examples of providing good internal customer service and are, ultimately, just as relevant to excellent external customer service as the skills possessed by ‘customer-facing’ staff.

Treating one’s fellow employees as customers is really about practicing the Golden Rule and, just as with paying customers, appropriate attitude and behaviour is essential.

Paul Tholen is Managing Director of Visiontheme Business Mentoring.