The Internal Customers: Who are They and What Can You Do to Improve Their Experience?

Internal customer service (ICS) is often a foreign concept to small businesses, unfortunately, but the larger corporations are all well aware of the importance it holds for a business, and have appropriate ICS strategies in place as well. To know exactly who these internal customers are and how you can improve your own internal customer service, let’s get into a few details.

Who are the Internal Customers?

Internal customers are your workforce or employees themselves, and for most businesses, they are the most important assets. The simple math is that unless the internal customer/employees are happy working for you, they won’t be able to make the external customers happy or may even not be inclined to do so.

When you run a company full of satisfied employees, you automatically increase efficiency, but this needs to be implemented with strategy and planning in order for it all to work productively. For more information regarding how internal customer service actually makes sense from a business perspective, read the linked resource.

What Can You Do to Improve Internal Customer Satisfaction?

You will likely need a professional customer service team to evaluate the particulars of your work environment and develop a proper strategy, but the following points are mostly what those strategies will be based on.

Make the Work Matter

Human beings are complicated, and although we are primarily driven by our instinct to survive, that primitive urge alone may not be enough to help someone be satisfied with what they are doing.

It is only when you add meaning to the company’s work that the workers will actually feel motivated about what they are doing.

Make them realize that the work they do actually matters by arranging events and meetings where the positive impact of their work on the company and the customers is highlighted. When you add meaning to any work, internal customer satisfaction is increased because everyone wants to know that what they are doing is important on some level.

Make Birthdays a Big Deal

Each and every member of a small business’ small workforce deserves special treatment on their birthdays. Even in the most competitive setting, it is important to make each employee feel special during at least one day every year. That one day of special treatment goes a long way towards ensuring internal customer satisfaction.

One may ask how can employees be customers if they are not buying anything? That, however, is a misconception because as a business owner, you are selling them the job which they are being hired to do.

Unless a company is able to earn more from an employee’s role in the business than what the company is paying the employee, they would not be hiring or keeping them on their payroll. Therefore, every employee on the payroll is an internal customer, playing different parts in making sure that the business can operate.

Unless those internal customers are satisfied, they might begin to leave the company, which isn’t that different from losing a client, especially if the employee in question is a particularly important one.