Your internal employees rely on one another every day. They must have clear communication and exceptional internal service cooperation with each other to get their jobs done moment to moment and at every touch point. How would it feel if one of your colleagues didn’t respond to your email or voice messages? What would that say about their apathy, their empathy and their commitment to your organization’s mission and values? It would be about the equivalent of a customer asking you for help and you completely and utterly ignoring them. After a while, you’re not likely to have very many customers left.
As a leader, your job is to remove obstacles that get in the way of your employee’s service. If you have an uncooperative or unresponsive employee, it is your job to address the situation and foster a work culture that creates exceptional internal service cooperation.
7 Ways to Create Internal Service Cooperation
- Stay Positive– have the same upbeat attitude with your internal partners as you could with your external customers
- Honor Commitments– when you make a commitment with a coworker, keep it!
- Communicate Often– The best customer service is created from high-touch, high-tech communication environments. This is one area where it is extremely important to focus on the small details and listen.
- Negotiate Expectations– share how another internal service provider can better assist you in serving an external customer
- Step Out of Your Silo– Network with co-workers from other areas of the organization to understand the internal service workflow. This is another area where the small details of understanding how your work effects others (and vice versa) will be extremely influential.
- Be Polite– treat co-workers with the same courtesy as you would customers, and help them be responsive and efficient to your external customers.
- Be Helpful– look for ways to directly or indirectly support a customer or co-worker.
If you want to create a work culture where your employees excel at both internal and external service, it’s important to focus on the 7 factors above, and reinforce these principles with learning and development opportunities so they can learn the skills and behaviors they need in order to do a great job with their internal and external customers. Read more about how you can train and develop your employees to have great customer service here.
When you provide your employees with development and foster a culture that emphasizes the importance of great internal service cooperation, your employees are more likely to be engaged and motivated to provide great service to your customers. Read more about how to create this engagement and why If Your Employees Aren’t Engaged, You’re Losing Profits.
Do you have any examples of exceptional internal service cooperation in your organization? How about terrible ones? How did these experiences effect your team’s productivity, motivation and results? We would love if you share your experiences in the comments below!