We have many categories of customers. I run a team that provides Application Hosting Infrastructure Design services. So my immediate customer would be the application manager because he approaches me when he needs application hosting. But is he really my only customer? Of course I am going to send out a Customer Satisfaction Survey after the project is complete to the application manager, but we need a holistic view here. After all, the application manager and I, are both IT.

So it is business that should be our customer. Why do we require applications in the first place? Well so that we can digitize the business, provide automation, so that the business can do their jobs faster, more efficiently, more accurately etc. So it is the business that should be our customer. And IT does conduct a customer satisfaction survey with the business from time to time.

"Business", its a novel concept isn't it?  I got curious and googled it's dictionary definition and this is what I found.

So when I say my customer is the "business", I am treating the word as a noun and assuming someone who is conducting the primary commercial activity that the organization is involved in. So if I am working for a Pharmaceutical organization, the primary activity would be...?

• Manufacturing drugs? But manufacturing isn't a commercial activity? Its just a service that helps in the primary activity
• Marketing drugs? But marketing alone won't get you the money, you would have to sell it? So Marketing is just a service and not a primary activity.
• Selling drugs? But you won't be able to sell the drugs without the distribution network? And it is delivery that gets you the money. So Selling is again a service.
• Distributing drugs? But where will you store the drugs, how will the supply chain work? What's the logistics behind it? Again distribution won't work alone unless you know what to distribute. Drugs will have to be researched and discovered.
• Researching and developing new drugs? Again you require many other services to get successful in researching drugs and researching alone won't be able to deliver profits

As I think about it deeper and deeper, the differences between the "primary activity" and "services" get more and more blurred. Ultimately all the activities within a business are ultimately a service that is provided to add to the larger picture of achieving the business objective. This also means IT is, as much a part of the "business" as any other service that we talked about above.

So if all the services are business (including IT) who's your customer? And what kind of Customer Satisfaction Survey should you send to them? For a healthcare and pharmaceutical company the customer could be the patients, the medical practitioners, the healthcare providers, the health insurance companies, etc. For a financial services company the customer could be the investors, for an automobile company the customer is the buyer of the automobiles and so on. And the single most effective Customer Satisfaction Survey (for all the service lines within the business) is the sales figures.

But is it that simple? Is there no merit in treating the internal stakeholders as customers? Of course there is. As long as the attitude is a "giving" attitude and not a "taking" attitude. As long as you treat your stakeholder as your customer and don't expect to be treated as one. Treating your immediate internal stakeholder as a customer does improve your service levels to an extent. But the downside is that it gives you myopia. You stay restricted to your SLA and your KPI and do not think out of the box to make your organization, as a whole, more efficient. Of course there are many other variables to this such as the organizational culture and the attitude towards innovation and that is a topic for another discussion. But considering all the other factors to be constant, it is only when you start treating yourself as "the business" and start looking at your organizational customer as your customer, that you can start thinking holistically of how you can do more.

So I ask you again. Who is your customer?