Customer Service: Understanding Internal vs External Customers скачать в хорошем качестве

Customer Service: Understanding Internal vs External Customers

We have in higher ed, internal and external customers. Even though that word customer doesn't always go over so well, we have to define who they are. Because what's been my experience is when I first started leading these trainings at Coastal Carolina University was people thought our customers was just faculty, staff, and students. We serve such a bigger gamut than that. So what I did is I used a business model and came up with it that we have internal and external customers. And how we teach people to understand the difference between that is your internal customers is anyone who provides a product, program, or service for someone to participate. The external customer is anyone who has the opportunity to participate in our programs, products or services. So when you just look at your external customers, most people think, it's our students, students, their sister, their brother, their mother, their father, their guardian. It's other universities that we collaborate with. It's the media, it's alumni, it's the community. It's the high schools we recruit from. There's over 18 different classifications within just internal customers that we've been able to identify. Then you have your external customers who ... I mean your internal customers rather who are providing that service, your faculty staff, your board of directors, your vendors that you outsource. And that's also you have your alumni that also fall into that category. So it's interesting to see if we really break down who our customers are in higher ed, it is way more than just faculty, staff and students. While we may not want to call students customers, sometimes people say that they don't want to call students customers because we have to hold them accountable, and we don't hold customers accountable. And I disagree with that. We actually, of course, we need to hold students accountable. Sometimes we actually have to expel students. So just because we call them a customer doesn't mean that we can't hold them accountable. It just means that how we interact with them on a day to day basis is through respect and through really holding them in high regard in terms of working with them through a situation in the best possible way.