When I worked in corporate IT support quite a few years back, I was very pleased with myself for embracing the notion that the corporation employees I helped were my “internal customers.” I believed that my assistance needed to be good enough and valuable enough to justify sending them a bill even though they would never see one. While this thinking helped me personally develop a customer focused work ethic, I see clearly see now it did not serve the corporation or its real customers very well.

In fact, the notion of an internal customer is one of the biggest factors in what Steve Towers and Terry Schurter calls “causes of work” and subsequently wasted resources and add no value for the real customer. The concept of the internal customer is as pervasive as it is seductive. It doesn’t surprise me when I get those incredulous stares when I emphatically state there is no such thing as an internal customer. It’s as if I said their mother can’t cook or their girlfriend is ugly. So, while I’m preparing to defend my statement, I’m also making sure I know where the closest exit is. So, the problem with the concept of internal customers is in its assumptions and here is why they are wrong.

The biggest assumption supporting the concept of the internal customer is that the requests of the internal customer are congruent with and serve the needs and expectations of the external or real customer. This is such a poor assumption on so many levels. We all know or sense there is so much effort made for non value add work that is in no way related to delivering a successful customer outcome (SCO). Studies show there is upwards of 70-90% of this non-value added work being done in most organizations. If you think about it, this concept of the internal customer is at least additive, if not a factor in the total problem. For example, when something goes wrong with the systems used to do some of these causes of work, they call on their internal support team to help fix the problem and unwittingly pull them into the costly mire of wasted resources and effort. Just how much of the total problem the support of these poor processes is we do not know. What is insidious about it is the cost of supporting these causes of work is buried in another department’s budget and not easily seen or questioned. This blind desire to please an internal customer has more than once enabled me to unwittingly help employees who were actually working on their children’s homework.

Another poor assumption is that the expectations of the internal customer reflect the expectations of the real customer and any service offering designed for the internal customer will also serve the real customer. No! The expectations of the internal customer often have nothing to do with the real customer. Their expectations are about job satisfaction, enhancing their careers, and other employee focused needs and desires, not the desires of the real customer. Those types of service offerings need to focus strictly on meeting external customer expectations and enabling internal employees to create successful customer outcomes. In this way, you need to ask yourself if are you a factor in these causes of work or are you identifying and eliminating them? Are you part of the problem or the solution? Before you ask for help, make sure what you are doing is contributing to a successful customer outcome. Before you blindly offer to help, make sure you understand how what you are being asked to do contributes to a successful customer outcome because that is what truly matters.

As with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, we need to grow up and put aside the “internal customer.” It does not serve our real customers and for that reason it doesn’t serve us.

Don Smith, CPP Lead Coach

Director - International Process and Performance Institute
www.ipapi.org