Internal and external customers what does this mean

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Over the past few years, companies have understood the necessity of providing an excellent customer experience CX. Organizations across the globe have taken steps to delight their customers and turn fans into loyal fanatics. But what about internal customers — your employees?

An obvious stakeholder might be a shareholder since they have voting rights at annual general meetings. A less obvious stakeholder would be the person that owns the land next to your factory, or the family that is supported by the father that works in your warehouse. A connected stakeholder is one with the direct association with your business, and this would be a supplier or a shareholder. Obviously other stakeholders would not have the same strength of connection, for example in the case of the local community.

We going to look at Starbucks coffee as an example of a company that has both internal and external customers, and we should be able to apply some of the terminology that we introduced above. The internal customers will be the people that work within the business of Starbucks. The internal customers will be everyone from the Board of Directors of the company, to the supervisors and team members that serve coffee at the customer interface. However, the goal of considering your employees as internal customers is to ensure that your internal stakeholders are engaged with your organization.

How can you achieve this and how does considering your employees as internal customers help organizations? As soon as organizations understand that employees are people who have specific needs as well, which should be taken into account when deciding on company culture, organizational strategy, internal processes and more. When organizations consider internal customers in a similar level of care and intensity as they would when looking at how they could improve the interactions with a paying external customer.

Then the organization is on the right track to create an environment, where employees can and will perform more than is required of them. They will even go the extra mile, simply because they feel engaged and valued by the organization.

Another perspective to remember is, that employees also represent the business to an external customer. Which means that if your employees are engaged and satisfied, they are able to project integrity and enthusiasm towards external customers. And once an external customer sees friendly and engaged staff, then it is more likely that an external customer decided to go with your service or your brand instead of choosing another.

Now you might be wondering how you should approach this when it comes to internal customers. Luckily, we can learn a lot by looking at proven methods and pointers when interacting with our external customers. I have mentioned in the beginning that there are differences as to how success can be measured for either external or internal customers.

I thought it mandatory to expand on this with a little more depth. Especially when considering or building a strategy to focus on internal customers, the learnings and the metrics we can see how organizations interact with external customers can provide some valuable pointers for our internal customers.

Organizations already invest heavily in making the customer experience, meaning the entire sales or purchase process, as easy, eventful, and memorable as possible. An external customer usually bases their experience and their interaction with your brand on factors such as your employees friendliness, the simplicity of purchasing from you, and the feeling of being valued meaning that the organization is somehow recognizing that the external customer has purchased from them.

The external customer experience begins when I for example first visit your website or enter a physical location and continues all the way through the sales process, as well as the actual interaction when using the product, how the customer service experience is for me as a customer and more. The customer experience only ends if and when I have finally decided to not use your service anymore.

On the other hand, customer satisfaction is a metric which applies to customers who have already purchased and used your product or service. So business owners need to have customer care measures to attract and retain customers to use the products you provide. Within the company, sometimes you are a customer, sometimes you are a service provider.

For example, an employee might ask you to print a document. In this case, you are the service provider because you give them what they need.

To be clear, internal customers are people who have a direct relationship with the company, and external customers are not. As seen in the definition, internal customers are people who work in different departments and branches of the business. In other words, they are employees in the company who directly produce and come into contact with the product. More than anyone, the company staff is the person who knows the best about the product; they will help to advertise your brand well.

Therefore, we can say that the internal customer is directly related to the company. Hence, we can see that there is no direct relationship between external customers and the enterprise.

Internal customers always have more information about products than external customers because they are directly related to the company, especially the people who manufacture those products themselves.

Therefore, they are not entitled to benefits as an employee of the company. Besides, they may not be able to grasp much information about the product so they will have difficulty bargain and easily accept the price offered by the seller. Apple is a great example of success when it comes to delivering good internal and external customer experiences. The corporate culture they put out is innovation, originality, and expertise.

To promote this culture, even the initial selection of candidates and initial training is made very carefully by Apple to ensure that every employee - especially those who work directly with customers - expresses itself, verify the business image.

Every customer who comes to the Apple Store knows that their salespeople are experts in their products and give good feedback to the company. The reason businesses need to learn from Apple experiences because we can see that the number of customers using products from the company is very large. In addition to that, the strategies in business characterize.