Lesson 3: Who are Your Customers?
CollegED July 28, 2025
Who Are Your Customers?
In order to deliver service, we must determine who our customers are. Some of us will serve internal customers, some of us will serve external customers, and some of us meet the needs of both. Do you understand who your customers are?
In this lesson, you will define who your customers are. You will also learn how to determine whether they are internal or external.
Types of Customers
Who are our customers? For many of us, customers are easy to identify. They buy something from us, or we serve them in some way. People will sometimes say, “I don’t work directly with customers.” Before you accept this idea, try taking a closer look at who our customers are.
In most organizations and agencies, customers take two forms: internal and external.
Internal customers are the people, departments, or agencies served by what we do. The only person who might have no internal customers is the individual who works completely alone. For the rest of us, internal customers are a fact of life. Do you meet with external customers, or somehow meet the needs of internal customers, like your co-workers?
As individuals, we all have at least one internal customer: our boss. We may also have internal customers in the form of people we supervise. They rely on us to meet their needs and they form opinions about how well we meet those needs.
External customers are the people, departments, or tenants who are the end users of our organization’s products or services. This is a much more traditional use of the term “customer.”
Do you have VIP (very important person) customers, people who rate extra special service? You may think that certain customers who spend a lot of money at your business are VIPs.
In reality, all the people we work with are our customers and deserve VIP treatment. When we treat all of our customers like VIPs, we start to become known as an organization that offers exceptional service to everyone.
What do people want? At the simplest level, our customers have some basic needs:
- They want to be understood.
- They want to feel welcome.
- They want to feel important.
- They want to feel comfortable.
