What is the definition of internal and external customers with an example?

Answer 1

A customer is some person or organization that uses an output from a different person or organization. Customers are defined as internal and external to an organization. External customers are most common in sales where a company sells a product to a customer. Internal customers are persons or departments who rely on output from another department of the same organization to accomplish their own function.

A typical example of an external customer is a grocery shopper who goes to a market to buy goods. This person is from outside the organization of the market.

In the supermarket example, an internal customer is the manager who relies on information from accounting to make decisions, or the stock person who needs to receive materials from the warehouse in order to put goods on the shelf.