ISO 9001 Training

Understanding ISO 9001:2008
Requirements for Quality Management Systems

8.2.1 Customer Satisfaction  

ISO 9001 Training - Key Explanation Points and Tips:

Customers are primarily the end users of your product, but also include intermediaries such as assemblers (internal or external) who integrate your product into theirs, and dealers and distributors who market and sell your product or the integrated product. You need to consider feedback from all these customers to determine whether or not you have met their specified and perceived requirements.

Customer requirements may relate to the design, manufacture, delivery, servicing and support of product; QMS; communication and financial requirements; etc. you must have controls to identify and meet these requirements (see clauses 7.1 - 7.6).

Customer satisfaction (feedback) is the first tool (required by this standard) to gauge the health of your QMS. This clause requires you to gather and analyze information as to what extent you met these requirements, from the customers perspective. What is the customer’s evaluation of your performance with regard to their requirements?

You must continually gather information (about these activities), in a manner capable of being analyzed and evaluated to determine how well you performed them. There are all kinds of performance indicators for design, manufacture, delivery, service and support, etc. Gather information on these indicators from both the customer as well from internal processes.

There are many ways to monitor customer satisfaction feedback (positive and negative). These may include - customer complaints; direct communications with customers; questionnaires and surveys; subcontracted collection and analysis of performance data (see clause 8.4); reports from consumer organizations; reports in various media; sector and industry studies.

You are expected to have a process that defines your customer satisfaction indicators; frequency and method of data collection; summarization, review and evaluation of data; actions to improve, timeline, responsibility and follow-up (see 5.6 management review).

Many customers routinely provide feedback on some or all of the information indicated above.  You must continuously review this customer feedback to ensure you maintain and improve your customer satisfaction rating.

You must monitor trends in customer satisfaction indicators and use these as a baseline for continual improvement. You should consider both external as well as internal customer satisfaction. Note that every internal process is either a customer or supplier of another process.

If any or all of your customer satisfaction process activities are done off-site, your QMS must include the off-site processes within your QMS and ensure that such processes comply with ISO 9001 requirements. You must show the interaction with the offsite organization (head office perhaps) in addressing these requirements and show how customer feedback information from Head office is used by you for continual improvement and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Clause 8.2.1 does not require a ‘documented’ procedure. However, you must identify and document the process addressing this clause as part of your QMS (see clause 4.1). For this process, you must also identify what specific documents, controls and resources are needed (see clause 4.2.1d. and 7.1b.). You could use a documented procedure or other combination of specific practices, procedures, documents and methods. Look at the risks and benefits in determining the extent of documented controls you need to have (also see clause 4.2.1 notes).

Performance indicators (to measure the effectiveness of processes that control customer satisfaction may include - improvement in customer feedback ratings; reduction in customer complaints; increase in the number of customers providing feedback; increase in feedback that leads to QMS and product improvement opportunities.