Despite the fact that Karld Albrecht and Jack Carson popularized the term Internal Client in their books "The Excellence of Services" and "The Service Revolution" more than a decade ago, its use has not been generalized and it is not for It is evident to everyone that until recently and forever he was nothing more than the worker, wage earner, laborer, laborer, and at most a human resource, for the moment being a client. Those who reason in this way affirm "Client is the one who pays" and they do not pay but rather they charge.
In this work we try to analyze where the main similarities and differences between the internal and external client lie. To do this, we will start with concepts proposed by the international ISO 9000 standards of 2000, in these:
A Customer is the Organization or person who receives a product.
A Product is the Result of a process.
And a Process is the Set of mutually related or interacting activities, which transform inputs into outputs.
From the union of the three previous concepts, it would be correct to propose that any organization or person who goes to another with a view to receiving the result of the process generated in it can be considered a client. Or put another way, any person or organization that reaches another with needs to be satisfied and the latter, by carrying out a series of activities, transforms the dissatisfactions presented by the former into satisfactions, may be called a client.
Even when conceptually, using the above concepts, the term internal customer is sustainable, not everyone will accept this definition, and there are differences between the two types of customer that significantly differentiate them from those found:
- The needs they satisfy The ways in which they reward the satisfaction of their needs The power of choice of the client The duration of the process of satisfaction of the needs
Each of the above conditions will be analyzed in detail below and illustrated graphically.
The needs that satisfy:
The regular customer normally comes to the organization to satisfy a majority and easily identified need: food, transportation, thirst, recreation, recovery of the optimal state of health, etc., while in the case of the internal customer for most people, even for many of the internal customers themselves, they only go to organizations to acquire money, when in reality they seek to satisfy needs for affiliation, security, self-esteem, self-realization, power. It may be the case that in certain conditions they prioritize one or the other need interchangeably, but that is not that the internal client seeks the satisfaction of her needs independently, but that for her the same and her way of satisfying them are clearer.
Both types of customers when receiving a product generally satisfy not a single need but a set of these. In the case of the external client, the amplitude of the group is more frequently more widely known, although while consuming a soft drink the thirst is satisfied as a primary and notable need, it may also be satisfying a social or affiliation need if the act of Drinking is done in a collective or a need for status if you buy a brand or expensive soft drink or in a renowned establishment and even a need for self-realization if in the past the consumer could not access the type of drink that they taste today.
When it comes to the internal client, despite the fact that there are multiple authors (Maslow, Mac. Gregor) who have described the set of needs that can be satisfied by working for the majority of people, the only or the fundamental purpose that it pursues a worker is satisfying a physiological need by obtaining money and they rarely recognize in others the needs for security, social, self-fulfillment and self-esteem.
The ways in which they reward the satisfaction of their needs.
While it is clear to everyone that the fundamental form that the external client has to repay the satisfaction of a need is money, without ignoring the others, not everyone realizes that it is through their own physical and mental effort that the internal client rewards satisfaction of a need. Most feel they are doing her a favor by paying the worker for her work and letting her work, while praying that the outside client will do them the favor of letting her serve them. In their myopia they do not realize that if the prisoner had not needed to satisfy needs through work and consequently had not paid with his effort to satisfy these needs, then they would not be in a position to offer a product and recover the money paid.
Just as the external customer pays more than the cost of the product received, the internal customer receives less money than the equivalent of the effort made, with the external customer's excess payment being the materialization of the added value by the internal customer and, consequently, the only way to profit, are therefore heads and tails of the currency called profit.
The customer's power of choice.
"The client is the King" affirm those who know that they depend on the external client and recognize this as the only client, and they do not stop having a certain reason, they depend on him to materialize his profit and he knows it, but as it almost always does not exist a single supplier of a product or service and as more and more the differences between the different suppliers are smaller and more difficult to achieve in the products themselves, they try to achieve it in the personalization of the product to the type of the client, thus exalting the importance of the external client. This situation gives great power to the external client who, when he is not completely satisfied with one supplier, will abandon him and look for another one.
The internal client does not suffer the same fate, since he has to face a market where job providers are scarce and their peers, the other internal clients are willing to do anything to get a job to satisfy their needs. Those who have a job pray not to lose it because if they did they might not be able to find it again. When a source of employment provider recognizes in one of his workers a unique or infrequent aptitude, he does the impossible to keep it, granting him then the client treatment that he has always deserved and that he has rarely been granted.
In summary, the external client has the power of choice since his offer to the supplier is scarcer than what the latter contributes, while the internal client rarely has the power of choice because his offer is abundant and what he demands is scarce.
The duration of the needs satisfaction process.
This feature, despite being the last, is perhaps the most important, since it is the one that in our opinion most influences that the existence of the internal client is not recognized by all.
The length of the service cycle by which the external customer receives the product that meets their needs is relatively very short compared to the length of the service cycle that meets the needs of the internal customer.
Usually external customers consume any type of product or receive a personal attention service sporadically, even when the interaction is daily, generally the time interval they spend interacting with the service to satisfy a specific need is small compared to the total hours of the day, this means that during that short period of time the external customer is forced to make an assessment of the quality of the product or service received based on the relationship between what they obtained and what they expected to obtain.
This brevity induces the client to be more objective in his assessment and it is very difficult to modify his assessment process by making changes in his expectations, needs or in the assessment of what is received. This whole process could be summarized as the contraction of the service cycle through an understanding of moments of truth.
In contrast to what is described above is the process by which the internal customer meets their needs. In this case, the internal customer generally interacts with the service cycle almost every day and at least 8 out of 24 hours a day. In such a way that the internal client rarely expects that his needs will be met immediately but over time, this causes his needs, priorities and expectations to change during this period, during which the assessment of the internal client is more subjective, passive and subject to greater influence from the provider of the service (employer). This other case could be summarized as the expansion of the service cycle by expanding the moments of truth.
Another argument in favor of the internal customer lies in the fact that, as is known, the concept of process has a relative character, since all activities carried out in an entity from the receipt of raw materials to that of the product can be considered a process. finished or the sales area or on the contrary processes can be considered each of the areas where some type of operation is carried out during the reception, storage or transformation of the initial product until it is converted into a final product, so then each of the areas independent within the entity could be considered a client of its predecessor in the transformation process and therefore would be an internal client,in the same way, within the same area, each worker who carries out an operation or set of these independently can be considered as the executor of a process and everyone who depends on it will be his client, so this will also be one more element that validates the existence of the internal customer.
Once all the previous analysis has been carried out, the following conclusions can be reached.
Conclusions.
- According to the analysis of the concepts customer, product and process, every worker has the right to be considered a customer.The fundamental reasons why many do not recognize the existence of the internal customer are:
- The needs they satisfy The ways in which they reward the satisfaction of their needs The power of choice of the client The duration of the process of satisfaction of the needs
The possibility that each power process presents in turn being decomposed into another set of processes becomes another reason for the existence of the internal client.
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