Customer Service Skills Knowledge Base and Frequently Asked Questions
What's the relationship between "internal customer service" and customer service to paying customers?
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Excellent customer service is a result of a number of things, many of which are unseen to customers, and have nothing to do with the direct customer-employee interaction. There's a kind of chain which ends with the customer, and if any link is broken, it negatively affects customer service.
So, you must look at the entire set of factors, and consider the following quote:
We cannot treat our customers any better than the way we treat each other.
Consider inventory control. The customer does not see all the processes at work to ensure that products are on the shelves in adequate numbers. But clearly, if inventory control is poor, customers will be frustrated at not being able to purchase what they want when they want. When those involved in supply chain management and inventory control see their job as serving the floor staff effectively (in effect considering them as internal customers), then that translates into a better customer experience. And the opposite occurs.
Providing excellent customer service is something that all people in an organization must address, even if they have absolutely no direct contact with the actual paying customers.
Robert Bacal is the author of two books on customer service: Perfect Phrases for Customer Service: Hundreds of Tools, Techniques, and Scripts for Handling Any Situation, and Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook. Most of the questions and answers in the Customer Service Knowledgebase (which you are reading now) is based on the material in these books.