Looking on the Inside – Why Internal Customer Service Affects External Customer Service Quality
Posted on December 12, 2011
There are a number of aspects that many business entrepreneurs consider to be essential for success of their business. One of them is providing excellent customer service to their customers. Customers and clients are the primary source of income for any business and as such, it is important to make sure that they continue to patronize the company’s products and services. Excellent customer service ensures this to any business entrepreneur.
It is because of this that many companies would allocate a considerable amount of their resources in this department from the workforce providing this service to the company’s customers to the training and technology made available. Despite this being the case, many companies continue to struggle in giving excellent customer service to both their new and existing customers. As a result, they continuously have to strive to attract and woo new customers to patronize their products and services.
According to many business analysts, the main reason behind this is because of the failure of many entrepreneurs to realize and understand that every company, regardless of the industry, has two sets of customers that they need to provide excellent service to. The first are the external customers, who are the ones availing the products and services. The second are the internal customers, who are the ones providing the services and products of your company to your external customers. Simply put, the internal customers of any company are its workforce.
It is understood that the primary goal of providing customer service is to meet the needs of the customer within a satisfactory level and within an agreeable timeframe. Failure to meet these needs would result to dire consequences to the company which includes, among others, incurring avoidable financial losses and expenses.
Based on studies that have been recently conducted with regards to the reasons why many companies have difficulty providing efficient and effective customer service is because most companies only focus on the external customers. The studies conducted by independent group of business analysts have determined that in reality, the crux of the entire struggle of providing excellent customer service lies within the company. Instead of merely pouring out all of the efforts to the internal customers, companies must make it a point to first meet the needs of their internal customers – their workforce.
When employees within a certain department do not feel that their needs are not being met or set aside by members of upper management, this starts a chain reaction that eventually affects the level of customer service provided to the external customers. In fact, it was determined that companies that fail to meet the needs of their internal customers with the same level of enthusiasm as that towards external customers experience high absenteeism among its employees, high employee turnover, poor performance and having a stressful working environment. Indeed, no matter how effective or efficient the strategies that are being implemented towards external customer service are, if the needs of these employees providing such service to your external customers are not first met, it would result to them performing poorly affecting the overall customer satisfaction level received by your external customers.
By: Grant Shields
Tags: Business Analysts, Business Entrepreneur, Business Entrepreneurs, Consequences, Customer Service Quality, Excellent Customer Service, Excellent Service, Existing Customers, External Customer Service, External Customers, Failure, Financial Losses, Internal Customer Service, Internal Customers, Primary Source, Providing Customer Service, Providing Excellent Customer Service, Reason, Satisfactory Level, Workforce
Categories: Business