Without doubt, our customers need to be the focus of our efforts. You’ll find that the word ‘customer’ appears 88 times in ISO 9001:2015. Some of the places it  appears are in the ‘General’ section, Quality Management Principles, the Process Approach, Scope, and these clauses: 4.2 Needs and Expectations of Interested Parties; 4.3 Scope; 5.1.2 Customer focus; 5.3 d) Organizational roles; 6.2.1 d) Quality objectives; 8.2.1 Customer communication; 8.2.3.1 Review of requirements; 9.1.2 Customer satisfaction and 9.3.2 c) 1 – Management Review.

You can see that this Standard takes Customer satisfaction seriously!

So to meet these requirements and to stay in business, we need to know how we’re doing. Electronic customer surveys just don’t cut it. 

It’s not easy to get good feedback, but it’s vital to our survival. We need to talk to our customers face to face every chance we get. Sales people are an obvious contact point, and anyone delivering our product or service can become the eyes and ears of our organization. The paybacks are enormous!

Make sure that you’re not spending resources on things that customers don’t value. Don’t add things that you THINK they want – add features that will keep them doing business with. Get some face time with customers to find out why they like you (and why they might not!). Use your resources to delight them, not drive them away. Call into your company and try to navigate your ‘phone maze’. Can customers get to the person they want? Make it easy to connect!

Know Quality, Know Profit…No Quality, No Profit

We have easy-to-use tools built into our Cloud-based Management System platform for managing your customer interactions. We’d be happy to spend 10 or 15 minutes with you to see if it’s a fit…

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