Aren’t Internal Customers as Important as External Customers? – Part Two
Last week, we saw how lack of proper communication can hurt internal customer service in an organization. Continuing from there, here are some more:
People: Another major obstacle to excellent internal customer service is people, your employees themselves. Arrogance, antagonism, or egotism between two individuals, two teams, or two business units can seriously hamper their relationship. These happenstances are quite common at many workplaces. One employee could be more senior to another and he probably resents being told what to do. Some managers do not like being told, questioned, or asked and don’t even bother with a reply. Or some employees regard some others as being not quite worthy of their job and pay.
In such cases, the delivery of work clearly suffers.
Lack of clear definition of responsibilities: Sometimes, the roles and responsibilities of individual employees or business units are not clearly defined. Startups and small enterprises, unfortunately, are both the culprits and victims in most cases here. When the workforce is small, generally, individuals and business units are saddled with more than one responsibility and often, one employee’s role and responsibilities might get him to encroach on another’s. In such cases, the execution of the service fails as confusion builds up about accountability.
To take a simple example, say, in a marketing team, a manager is responsible for the maintenance of the company website. Now, there is also the content writer who is responsible for the content on the website while there is the designer who is responsible for the design. What if the content writer leaves it upon the manager to manage the content too, thinking that it is the manager’s responsibility?
Therefore, a clear demarcation of boundaries and clear division of responsibilities is essential to make sure that an employee fulfills his task and does not step on the toes of others.
This will be continued in the next post.
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