How Customer Satisfaction is Enhanced with Clause 9.1.2 of ISO 9001

This article sums up the key requirements of ISO 9001 which help organizations to improve their customer satisfaction and make way for more sales.

A happy customer that purchases repeatedly from your business is always a more worthy prospect. The ISO 9001 certification for the quality management system (QMS) emphasizes on the improvement in customer satisfaction for this reason. A section or clause of the standard i.e., clause 9.1.2 explains that an organization needs to monitor and understand the perceptions of their customers to provide products or services that meet their expectations or needs. Knowing the perceptions of customers is not that easy. An organization should apply specific methods for collecting their feedback, monitoring their purchase or consumption pattern, and analyzing the collected feedback to make better decisions regarding the product or service. The particular clause of the ISO 9001 standard underlines how to do all that for ensuring higher satisfaction of the customers and obtaining more sales. The following section points out the steps that you need to undertake for knowing your customers’ wants and fulfilling them. Take a look.

3 Steps to Meet Clause 9.1.2 of the ISO 9001 Certification for Customer Satisfaction

Creating a Strategy for Obtaining Feedback

You need to determine an appropriate strategy for collecting valuable feedback from the customers and analyzing their behavior. To create the strategy, you need to first identify who the target customers are and what they want. You need to then understand the pain points of customers which your product or services seek to solve. For that, you should first decide on the procedures or tools for collecting customer feedback or data. There must be a dedicated team who would be responsible for collecting the relevant data in real-time. Along with that, you need to decide how the data should be evaluated to address the interest of your business, using which tools, and by whom. When all that is decided, you should end your strategy by considering how to improve your products or services using the collected data.

Spot the Customer Satisfaction Indicators

Unless you identify the key indicators of customer satisfaction in your business, it is impossible to collect data effectively. There are a vast number of factors that indicate the experience of customers with its products or services. These factors vary with industries. Therefore, it is essential to identify the factors that particularly help to determine customer satisfaction in your industry. Some common indicators that you can consider for your business are delivery time, customer services, customer complaints response, demand for products/services, competitive pricing, and repeat purchases.

Applying Methods for Collecting Customer Feedback

While you have determined the type of data or feedback to obtain from the customers, it can be difficult to get them from the customers. There are many objective methods to collect feedback such as sending questionnaires, online/offline surveys, finding cues from customer complaints, outsourcing agencies for collecting feedback, organizing focus groups, analyzing causes of product returns, and directly communicating with customers at PoS (Point of Sale).

When you have finalized the methods to collect the feedback, it is then necessary to set up tools and time for analyzing all the collected feedback. When there is negative feedback from customers, you should identify the root cause that leads to disappointment and decide on necessary improvements in the products or services. Also, don’t forget the positive feedback of customers. You need to share those positive reviews with your employees to boost their confidence. Also, happy customers’ feedback would help you identify the key strengths of your business.

Key Takeaway

The ISO 9001 certification is beyond a quality certification for businesses. It works as a symbol of trust indicating that a business is capable enough to satisfy the needs and expectations of its customers. As a result, it opens prospects for new sales. Clause 9.1.2 of the standard helps organizations to ensure that by focusing on customer satisfaction. It underlines regular collection of customer data, analysis of data, and implementation of timely actions as key processes of the quality management system (QMS) that must be followed for higher customer satisfaction.