Quality Management System Principles: Customer Focus

Quality Management System Principles: Customer Focus

The ISO 9001:2015 requirement for Customer Focus is about understanding and taking care of the customers specified needs and expectations by providing products and services that effectively address them.  To implement this, you would be required to research and understand their needs and expectations.

When you understand what your customers want or needs are, you will have a better chance of figuring out how to get the right materials, people and processes in place to meet and exceed their expectations.

Customer Focus means putting your customers’ needs first.  While service skills are key to Customer Focus, the company must show that the customer experience matters across the organisation, at every step of the journey.

Customer Focus is extremely important and is essential to a good Quality Management System.  Research successful organisations that have implemented a Quality Management System.  They focus on the customer and the customer experience with their products and services.  These companies put the customer first.

Consider the impact of every part of your Quality Management System on the customer. This begins with knowing who your customers are, both internal and external.  Meet with your employees and ascertain who your customers are.  After you have identified your internal customers, your list will undoubtedly surprise you.

The needs want and expectations of your customers are not part of the portfolio of your Marketing Department so that you can concentrate on calibration, training or health and safety management.  If it is your responsibility to implement a Quality Management System. Enhancing customer satisfaction should be your core focus, not the creation of spreadsheets, attending meetings or taking minutes.

Once the requirements of your customers have been established, you can incorporate this information into your ISO 9001 Quality Management System.  You should strive to exceed customer expectations.  Exceeding their expectations will achieve satisfaction and improve your company’s image and reputation.

Don’t look at a Quality Management System as someone else’s problem, you don’t want to be in that situation.

Companies depend on their customers.  Without them, there would be no need for most companies to exist.  Focusing on the customer provides a unity of purpose when all activities and efforts are directed towards achieving customer and regulatory requirements.  It is Top Management’s responsibility to emphasise this fact throughout the company.

Companies gain a competitive edge in implementing an ISO 9001 Quality Management System, compared to what their competitors offer.  Value is defined as improving the worth of the product or service to the customer by either lowering the price, increasing the product or service performance characteristics or both.

Top Management must focus on increasing the value to the customer while optimising the use of the Quality Management System resources so minimising the risks and costs to the company.

Customer satisfaction is the perception of how well their needs and expectations have been fulfilled, whether these needs and expectations are stated or implied.

It is by understanding and addressing these and other perceptions and by building pre and post-sale relationships with each customer, that you can achieve and enhance satisfaction.

Everything else flows from these definitions.  A company’s products, services, support, management, employees, vision, mission, strategies, business plans, goals and objectives, business processes, consideration of risks and opportunities, employees’ responsibilities, business environment and culture must be developed around and focused on achieving these two primary objectives.

This ISO 9001:2015 requirement for Customer Focus relates to Top Management’s role in accomplishing this by demonstrating their leadership and commitment in applying this approach to Customer Focus across all the activities listed above.

This does not mean that they must do it themselves, but they must provide the necessary direction and oversight to make sure the company does it and does it effectively.

SRM is ISO 9001;2015 certified, and we have taken many clients through to certification, by assisting them with the design and implementation of their Quality Management System. Let us know if we can help you?

Related Links:

https://srmc.co.za/iso-certifications/

https://srmc.co.za/iso-9001-in-90-minutes-series-1-clause-4-context-of-the-organisation/