Who are your customers?

Last week I audited a class that I am going to teach for the American Management Association, called "Customer Service Excellence: How to Win and Keep Customers." This class focused on developing positive and proactive communication skills, working with your own and others' personality styles, and assessing auditory-visual-kinesthetic processing in customer relations.

What struck me as most impressive, although the whole class was very good, is understanding that you have internal and external customers, who both deserve customer-level treatment. I did not expect internal customer discussion in this class, based on the title, but I think that it provides an essential understanding of how to succeed in any organization, whether it is for-profit, non-profit, public service, etc. Your internal customers, or co-workers, can make or break your success personally and in the delivery of products or services to your external customers.

I have worked in organizations that talked about being a team, but individually had no interest in working as one, with leaders who did not value building their teams for success. I didn't stay long in those organizations, as they were dysfunctional and, subsequently, on a downward spiral. Internal customer service is vital to an organization's success -- the better it works, the better the organization performs.

If your organization's employees are not serving their internal customers and productivity is less than desired, I can conduct this training class at your organization's location(s), to train all employees how to work effectively with one another in a positive and proactive manner. It not only improves employee morale, but can really help the organization's performance.