Customer Relationship Management cheat sheet

Internal and external customers

• Quality is defined by whether it meets a customer's requirements, so the unit starts by identifying exactly who the customers are.
• An internal customer is a person or department inside the organisation that receives another department's output; an external customer is outside the organisation and buys or receives its final products or services.
• Customer requirements are stated (explicitly specified), implied (not stated but reasonably expected from normal use) or delight factors (unstated extras that exceed expectation and build loyalty).
• Statutory and regulatory requirements, such as standards, safety regulations and consumer-protection law, are non-negotiable whatever a particular customer asks for.
• Total quality management treats internal customers with the same discipline as external ones, because a defect passed on inside the organisation reaches the external customer later and costs more to fix.