Everyone is a customer

If you can only focus on one thing in your business, make it customer service. Not just to the paying customers--though treating them nice is a good thing--but to the internal customers as well. Who are the "internal customers?" Everyone. Every employee, driver to Director, is a customer.



Customer service is the key performance indicator. It shows (among other things) whether your company processes are running efficiently and links each job to the paying customer. Good things to know.

Tom Peters says:

we urge participants to make the level of customer satisfaction the primary basis for incentive compensation and annual performance evaluation for virtually every person at every level in every function throughout the organization. We also urge every organizational unit in every function to develop key quality measures. Progress should be posted on charts in every work space, and a quantitative goal report should be the first item of business at every staff meeting, regardless of topic.

The video explains how and why each person in the company is a customer, and a supplier. And a worker too, dang it. Each job has three phases: receive input, do work on the input then send the output to someone else. You are a customer when you receive and a supplier when you send, and a worker in between.