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“The internal customer experience drives the external customer experience”
~ Andrew Szabo
Don’t Overlook a Very Important Customer — Your Employees and Teammates!
Who is your customer?
Who are you serving?
Whoever you provide a service to is your customer.
Positively Outrageous Service® (POS) isn’t only about creating an excellent experience for your external customers, clients, patients, or guests. Not everyone in an organization is in the front-line dealing with the external customer. Positively Outrageous Service is just as essential to implement internally.
Everyone in an organization has to interact with others.
Your internal customer is every bit as important as the external customer. Perhaps even more critical. When we serve another teammate, or as a leader, your team, Positively Outrageous Service comes into play.
Anyone who experiences your support, interface, process, or relationship is an internal customer.
For example, IT, payroll, HR, legal, and administration are typical examples of internal functions serving other employees. However, anyone that supports another person providing data or resources is serving that stakeholder.
In actuality, to have a cohesive, consistent, consolidated culture means that everyone has a role in supporting others in an organization. Poor internal service results in a splintered organization, turf wars, and ultimately poor inconsistent service to the external customer.
Here are three indispensable considerations when serving an internal customer:
- Employees who are the beneficiaries of Positively Outrageous Service feel appreciated and empowered. POS motivates and drives higher performance levels in themselves – to serve others, whether internally or externally. Besides, when employees have the resources, tools, information, and processes to excel, you enable them to perform to extraordinary levels.
- Motivated, appreciated, empowered employees are more engaged and less likely to leave. Employee retention increases, costs decrease, and often they are advocates attracting others who are like them – service naturals!
- Employee satisfaction is as critical as customer satisfaction. Engaged, happy, motivated employees provide higher levels of service to customers. If they are disgruntled, distressed, or unmotivated, their performance deteriorates.
Want a new business growth strategy? – inspirationally interact and infect your employees with Positively Outrageous Service. There is a direct correlation between employee and customer satisfaction, as well as increased revenue growth. Every two percent improvement in employee satisfaction and engagement results in a one percent elevation in customer satisfaction rippling out to a two percent increase in revenue!
Positively Outrageous Service is infectious – love on each other internally, and the front-line will love on the customer.
The three principles of Positively Outrageous Service apply with internal customers too:
- Have them encounter the random and unexpected – which takes forethought on your part!
- Have them experience things that are out of proportion to the circumstances.
- And don’t forget to be playful and fun!
Finally, for it to become inculcated into your culture, it necessitates internal customer excellence through POS to be a habit and not just a one-off, occasional occurrence.
We look forward to you being Positively Outrageous with your internal and external customers!
© 2021 Positively Outrageous Service, Inc., Positively Outrageous Service® is a registered trademark of Positively Outrageous Service, Inc.
