Sending emails to my team is often a dicey proposition. Most emails are met with little or no response, leaving me insecure as to whether the information is being effectively communicated. On the flip side, if I do get several responses to an email, I know I’ve struck a chord.
I recently sent an email to our team recognizing Chris, one of our programmers (See his “Programming” guest post) after one of our customer service representatives took the time to tell me just how helpful he was. In my email I showered praise on Chris and basically nominated him for president. Shortly after sending that message, several people responded with additional praise and confirmation that Chris is indeed doing an amazing job at serving his “internal customers” at our company.
This overwhelmingly affirmative response got me thinking. We have talked in the past about a chain in customer service where your front line staff will only treat customers as well as they are treated. There is a ton of truth to that statement. How many people love asking for help only to receive a negative attitude in return? It works the same for customers calling support as it does for customer service representatives going to the upper support tiers within an organization.
With that being said, my charge to you today is to not forget about the people, like Chris, that you go to on a regular basis to ask questions. Whether they like it or not, they are in the business of (internal) customer service too. Sure, many of them may be slightly or extremely more on the introverted side, but their ability to patiently explain and sometimes dumb down otherwise complex technical concepts for us non-techies, ensures that we provide awesome customer service to our (external) customers.
Take a moment today to appreciate those around you providing the awesome (internal) customer service. If we’re going to succeed at providing AWESOME customer service, we need them!
