Do Customers Know What They Want?

Yes, but they don't always tell you.

ISO 9001 has a requirement that directly relates to the issue of customer focus. Subclause 5.1, which concerns management commitment, requires that: "Top management shall provide evidence of its commitment to the development and implementation of the quality management system and continually improving its effectiveness by:

a) communicating to the organization the importance of meeting customer as well as statutory and regulatory requirements…."

To meet these requirements, an organization must first know what they are.

Subclause 7.2.1, "Determination of requirements related to the product," goes much further and requires that: "The organization shall determine:

a) requirements specified by the customer, including the requirements for delivery and post-delivery activities,

b) requirements not stated by the customer but necessary for specified or intended use, where known,

c) statutory and regulatory requirements related to the product, and

d) any additional requirements determined by the organization."

On the surface, all this appears to be a no-brainer. Of course, organizations must understand what their customers require. But there's a small fly in this simple ointment. It starts with the notion of "requirements not stated by the customer but necessary for specified or intended use, where known." Often, customers don't know what those details are, and the supplier might not know the intended use. This is a real opportunity for disaster. Who's responsible for making certain that this situation is addressed and resolved? Subclause 7.2.2, "Review of requirements related to the product," requires the ISO 9001 user to deal with this: "Where the customer provides no documented statement of requirement, the customer requirements shall be confirmed by the organization before acceptance." Subclause 7.3.6, "Design and development validation," requires that "design and development validation shall be performed in accordance with planned arrangements (see 7.3.1) to ensure that the resulting product is capable of meeting the requirements for the specified application or intended use, where known."

Meeting customer desires is often complicated because customers don't always tell us all of their requirements. For most products and services, it's normal to have a mixture of stated and unstated customer requirements. Stated requirements are those that the customer expresses when making the commitment to buy from us. For example, when booking a hotel room, the customer might specify that a king-size bed is required and that the room must be a nonsmoking one. The customer may not have specified that a high-speed Internet connection is needed to connect with her company's network. Having assumed that this will be available, the customer will be disappointed on arrival when she discovers that there's no high-speed connection, and the only place to plug a computer into a phone line connection is in the hotel lobby.

Organizations must determine unspecified customer needs through surveys, discussions with customers and customer feedback (such as complaints). It's important to address generic expectations specific to the product, service or sector.

Customers usually need or want outcomes more than they want a specific product. Consider the story of a young man who's admitted to the hospital with appendicitis. The cure alone is his desired outcome. On the other hand, a cure might not be the best outcome. Perhaps the best possible outcome would be that his appendix is removed, he's cured in a few days, and while in the hospital meets a lovely, rich young lady on the staff. Later they fall in love and get married. Contrast this with an outcome where the young man is cured of appendicitis but, while in the hospital, he contracts a blood disease and dies. The hospital can't guarantee every young man a rich wife with each stay, but it can identify possible poor outcomes and work to eliminate their potential causes.

The presence of a telephone data port connection in the hotel room and sanitary conditions to prevent the transmission of blood diseases in the hospital were never specified by the customers but were required anyway. As the examples illustrate, these situations are much more common than we might at first suppose.

So how far must you go to understand what the real customer requirements are? You must go far enough.

Note: This article is based on material contained in the book Unlocking the Power of Your Quality Management System: Keys to Performance Improvement by John E. (Jack) West and Charles A. Cianfrani (ASQ Quality Press, 2004). See Chapter 3, "Shift the Focus from Internal Operations to the External Customer," for a more comprehensive discussion of this subject.

About the author
John E. (Jack) West is a consultant, business advisor and author with more than 30 years of experience. From 1997 through 2005 he was chair of the U.S. TAG to ISO/TC 176. He remains active in TC 176 and is chair of the ASQ Standards Group.