Internal Customer Service Doesn’t Stay Internal: Why Great Service Shouldn’t Stop at the Office Door

Rick was a network engineer at a large county government’s IT department. He was highly competent with the technology he worked with. He even held a Cisco CCNP certification. He also prided himself on his customer service skills, but he raised an interesting question during an in-person training session. The topic was what was reasonable to expect from end-users in terms of their competence. Rick wanted to know whether he should treat struggling internal customers the same way as external customers. He believed that internal customers had a responsibility to maintain a level of technical competence. He felt that some internal customers were being lazy by not maintaining technical competence with the tools they used regularly, such as word processors and spreadsheets. He resented answering the same questions over and over.

Rick’s frustration is understandable. I’ve occasionally grown impatient with users who seem to repeatedly have the same issues or questions. You probably have, too. Our reality, however, is that our jobs are about serving people. Some of them are external customers, such as people who pay for our products and services. In Rick’s case, in a county government, he and his team served citizens: the taxpayers who need licenses and permits, county health records, courts and legal records, and so on. If you work in education, your external customers could be parents, while your internal customers might be teachers, paras, administrators, and other staff members. Regardless of where you work, some customers are internal, and some are external.

Internal vs. External Customer Service

If you’re an IT exec, you can set policies to help your teams understand their responsibilities. If you’re an IT technician or engineer, you owe it to yourself to be clear on what’s expected of you. There may be some end-users who seem to suck up all of your time. If you find yourself dealing with someone like that, consider discussing expectations with your team lead.

Here are three ideas that may help you decide how to handle such situations:

Internal and external customers have different needs and responsibilities, but they deserve the same standards of care. Sure, there may be some customers who are more demanding of your time, but that doesn’t excuse bad behavior by an IT person. Frankly, there’s never an excuse for being condescending, impatient, or dismissive.

A Management Problem or a Technician’s Frustration (Or Both)

Distinguish between a management problem and a technician’s frustration. Certainly, if an individual keeps asking for help with the same problem, that needs to be addressed, but it’s not usually appropriate for the technician or engineer to withhold help or show frustration. Those requests for help might indicate a need for training, better support resources, or a one-on-one with the manager and the employee.

Awareness and Intentionality with Internal vs. External Customers

I write frequently about awareness and intentionality. This is a great example of a place where they come into play. Rick is understandably frustrated by the repeated requests for the same type of support. If he can become aware of himself getting frustrated, he can then be intentional about how he handles it.

Remember, Internal customer service doesn’t stay internal. The clerk Rick helped may also be the person who issues permits for an external customer. In a business setting, the salesperson who can’t access a CRM may be trying to help a paying customer.

Among the options for Rick are:

• Helping the person with the immediate problem.
• Teaching the person how to resolve it themselves.
• Direct the user to a knowledge base article or an AI.
• Determine the cause. Why does this keep happening?

Remember, you can hold people accountable without treating them poorly. Nobody starts their day thinking about how they can be a pain in the neck to the IT department. Remember, also, the person who struggles with a cloud application might also be a brilliant attorney. No one is an expert on everything.

Rick may be completely justified in believing that an employee should know how to perform a particular task. He just shouldn’t confuse a legitimate expectation of competence with permission to show contempt for someone who hasn’t met that expectation. This is a great example of a situation calling for the five principles of IT customer service: technical competence combined with compassion, empathy, good listening, and treating others with dignity and respect.

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