The Importance of Serving Internal Customers

When was the last time you rolled out the red carpet for your internal customers?

On this episode of The AV Profession, Tim Albright and Brad Malone take a look at serving internal customers, and ways to do that better.

“When I look at serving internal customers, that doesn’t mean I am beholden to them, or I am less than them,” says Malone. “It means that I am serving the person downstream from me, because they have to use what I gave them. And why wouldn’t I give them the best head start that I can?”

In an earlier post we talked about handoffs, and it’s kind of like in football, if we drop the handoff every time, would we win? No. That handoff is the most important part when we’re doing a running play.

Navigate embraces quality and process, and sometimes those two words are seen as bad words. But we have helped hundreds of integrators get rid of waste, drama, chaos and redo by focusing on quality and process.

You don’t get time back, and this has a bigger impact on project driven companies.

“If one project goes a little awry, not only do I have to repair that project, but I have really messed up the six other projects that were waiting in line for that resource. So now I’ve got this kind of ripple effect that’s going to go cost me, and now I’ve got delays and overtime, and all that stuff,” says Malone.

Most integrators have an org chart paradigm, which is very siloed, and your allegiance is to the people above you in that siloed org char, so that’s where your focus is.

“I try to help integrators shift from an org chart paradigm to a swim lane kind of model,” Malone explains.

We have some diagrams of swim lanes in the Resource Library on our website. This shows where the key handoffs happen across the organization, and will help you serve your internal customers better.