Internal and external customers

I left Uppsala 1999 with a Master's degree in English linguistics, and have since then worked mainly within the IT and telecom field with language and localization related work.
At my current workplace, although belonging to the software organization, my section does not deliver much code, but rather function as a subvendor to the various software projects, providing refined resources to platform and application development.

From a customer definition perspective, we can distinguish various types of customers that all have different expectations on us. On a higher level we can divide them into internal and external customers, with the software project being our primary customer. After all, it is their resources we refine governed by their requirements and deadlines, and the the quality of the material we supply to them influence the perception of their deliverables further down the line.
Other types of internal customers, once we have a finalized product or a functional prototype, are the various market and customer units who have other requirements on our deliverables, be it legal requirements, region or market specific requirements, or marketing requirements that we need to comply to.

Examples of external customers are the various telephony operators around the globe. They can have very specific requirements and expectations on what we deliver, and compliance to their expectations is crucial as their business constitute a large part of our revenue.
Finally, there's the end users, the consumers, the people who are the final buyers of our products. They are of course an external customer to greatly consider. If our deliverable, our part of the final user experience, is not up to par with the quality expectations of the end user, then it will not matter how much we complied to our other customers, internal or external. If we do not come through to the end users and provide them with a unique experience, we risk our customer retention as they may turn to other suppliers in search of that unique experience.

My expectations on this course is to gain a better understanding of the psychology and theories regarding customers and customer experience, and strive to find methods to apply this understanding as variables in our continuous quality enhancing analytics, with the objective to increase the satisfaction for all our various types of customers.

I also look forward to using social media as a means of study, a new format for me. I am not a particularly avid user of social media; my social media presence has so far not reached far beyond Facebook and LinkedIn. I did create a Twitter account in 2009, but I have hardly ever used it as I didn't really come to terms with how to use the 140 character communication format successfully and couldn't untangle the web of replies, retweets, mentions and other whatnots.


This post is the first in a series of reflections and assignments I will write as part of the course "Understanding Customer Experience" provided by Karlstad  Business School.