Internal Customer Orientation
In 1992 I wrote my master’s thesis about internal customer orientation. The most important part of that thesis was about how to measure the internal customer satisfaction. I chose to do the research for the HR departments of a chemical company, a psychiatric hospital and a utilities supplier. I used the frame of SERVQUAL, developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Berry. That model was quite popular in the early 90’ies. Internal customers of the HR department could rate the services they received from that HR department.
The topic of (internal) customer orientation was hot then, as it is now and as it has always been. And of course it’s always linked to an external customer. Or at least it should.
It’s not that we have suddenly discovered the customer as prime source of meaningfulness and growth. Companies have not stopped looking for ways to optimize their customer strategy all along. As far as customer intimacy was their strategy, a great deal of effort went to service quality improvement. Let’s not forget that some companies do not focus on customer service as differentiator, but more on operational excellence or product leadership.
The Game has Changed
I recently browsed through that master’s thesis. It’s amazing that we still talk about similar stuff. As if we haven’t learned much. But something has changed since then. Digitalisation is changing the customer experience and is altering the rules of the game. Where the service towards the customer is becoming digital, the efforts a company and its people should do to connect with the customer become bigger. Customers have become more demanding than ever.
The strategies of the future will all be customer-driven. And that means there will always be an Olympic Minimum to attain on process and product excellence. But in no way an organisation can put customers after the product or the process. And yet, many organisations still do. Recently I heard an executive saying that the only problem his company had, is that the customer did not like the product they made, but that the software in itself is perfect. You are so dead, I thought.
Our product is perfect. Only the customer does not like it.
A phrase like that is a symptom of an internal focus. It’s problematic because the expertise is put ahead of the customer’s interest. It’s problematic because there is no empathy for the customer.
No Room for an Internal Focus
So can you imagine there would still be room for an internal focus? Companies must act in an agile way in the face of changing customer demands, and any internal focus leads to waste of energy, time and focus. In the end it leads towards a mediocre customer experience.
And that’s why internal customer orientation is dead.
Why it’s a Waste of Time to Focus on Internal Customer Orientation
But we still talk about it. This has the risk of creating waste for several reasons.
- The nature relation between internal units is usually different than between a company and its customers. Even when an organization introduces ABC and considers internal service providers as profit centers, at the end it will still be the final customer that should be the main source of inspiration. ABC might give a false sense of customer focus as it is usually a way to make accounting more efficient, not the customer more happy.
- Discussions about internal customer service do not necessarily lead to improvement of external service quality. Only discuss about the external customers. Take their perspective.
- Internal customer orientation allows internal departments to keep their distance to the external customer. Every distance is detrimental to the customer experience. Very often a unit that has direct contacts with the customer suffers from the fact that the internal (back-office) does not feel the pulse of the customer.
- Internal customer satisfaction has no value in itself. Could it be that all internal customers are satisfied, but the end customer is not? Yes it could be. But it’s not a very sustainable situation.
- Focus on the internal customer satisfaction could lead to consumerism or even entitlementitis (the feeling to be entitled to a better internal service quality). Think about it. Units or even individuals could claim a better service than needed, under the pretext of customer orientation.
- For internal departments it’s not always easy to focus on the external customers. HR, Finance, IT, Legal have a hard time translating their activities into customer driven processes. But it’s not impossible.
The way forward
There are many things we can do to cut the focus on internal customer orientation.
- Build end-to-end processes in which every unit finds its place and contributes towards external value-creation.
- Define what internal departments should do to strengthen the service towards the external customer.
- Define optimal internal processes that are as lean as possible and hook into the main value chain.
- Build a culture that breathes the external customer. The discussion should not be about “what you can do for me” but “what can we do together for the customer“.
- Focus on what drives the business in terms of customer needs.
- Build multidisciplinary teams around the customer needs. These teams include the internal departments.
Internal Dissatisfaction is not an option
This does not mean that internal satisfaction is not relevant for customer service. On the contrary. We know that how people behave determines the customer experience.
I do not want to minimise the quality of an internal system. However, if that internal system is not inspired by the external customer, it creates inefficiencies and waste.
The attention we give to ourselves, we cannot give to the customer.
A culture drenched in the awareness of the importance of the customer is one of the key factors of success. Someone should not be satisfied about the service he gets from any internal supplier as such. He should be satisfied about the coöperation in the face of the customer needs.
Internal customer orientation is dead. The customer experience is alive.
