What is Internal Customer Service?

Internal customer service is the quality of service that employees, teams and departments provide to one another inside an organization.

An internal customer is anyone within your organization who directly or indirectly depends on you in order to do their job effectively. Outstanding internal customer service is when people can trust one another to communicate, collaborate, solve problems and follow through.

Why Is internal customer service important?

Strong internal customer service helps work move more smoothly throughout an organization. It improves collaboration, speeds up problem solving, reduces friction between departments, strengthens accountability and makes it easier for employees to get the information, decisions and support they need to do their jobs well. It also has an important impact on the external customer experience. Employees are better able to serve customers when the people and departments behind them are responsive, reliable and easy to work with.

Poor internal service creates the opposite effect, negatively impacting workflow, quality, morale and overall trust.

Internal customer service is about trust

The core of internal customer service relationship is trust, and that trust is created by three drivers:

Caring: Do people believe you care about their needs and outcomes?

Competence: Do they trust your ability to get things done effectively?

Integrity: Can they depend on you to follow through and act responsibly?

Internal customers and external customers are different

There are some fundamental differences between internal and external customers, and these differences become important considerations when designing training programs.

INTERNAL CUSTOMERS

Have greater visibility into the bigger organizational picture
Can create ripple effects throughout the organization when service breaks down
Have little choice about who provides the service they need
Have longer-term, collaborative relationships
Understand more about company processes and policies
Share an interest in the organization’s success
Operate within a common organizational culture
Have more context about organizational challenges
Are usually both customers and service providers
Expect collaboration rather than a purely transactional relationship
Often communicate less formally
Can be affected by hierarchy and organizational politics
Are more likely to know the service provider personally
Often have less clearly defined service expectations

External Customers

May be people you’ve never met before
Have relatively transactional relationships with employees
Can take their business elsewhere
Don’t know your internal processes
Have little context for your policies and procedures
Are unfamiliar with internal terminology
Bring expectations shaped by experiences with other organizations
May judge the organization based on a single interaction
Don’t distinguish between your internal departments
Don’t care about internal issues or competing priorities
May need more explanation and clarification
Don’t know what information or authority an employee has access to
Compare your service with competitors
Expect their needs to be a priority

Internal customer service needs different training

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to try and just tweak their existing customer service training programs to create training for internal service. That doesn’t work. The customers are different, the applications are different, and the skills are different.

The same is true for standardized off-the-shelf courses on internal customer service. The reason they don’t achieve results is that every organization, and every department is also different. To actually have an impact, training needs to be strategically customized to meet the specific needs.