Who are internal customers?

Internal customers are members or staffs or outside suppliers of an organization who are directly associated with that organization. This means, if one department or individual within an organization supplies another such within the same organization with goods or services, then the latter is described as the internal customer of the former.

For example, a dispatch department can be the internal customer of a packaging department, which in turn may be the internal customer of the manufacturing department. Anyone in the organization can be an internal customer.

An internal customer can be a co-worker in another department or in the same department, a distributor who depends upon us to provide products or services which in turn are utilized to create a deliverable for the external customer. In general, internal customers don't have a choice. For example, if the sales department doesn't like accounting's policies, they can't fire that department and hire another.