Listening to the Customer
When the customer speaks, the organization listens and delivers what's required. If we accept the premise that customers are of paramount importance, how can an organization's quality management system (QMS) enhance an organization's focus on external customers? The ISO 9001 model encourages an organization to focus on its customers in several ways.
Despite the often-voiced comment that "our organization is concerned with satisfying customers," most organizations don't have a true customer focus. It's rare for everyone in an organization to feel true ownership of customer satisfaction, even when the organization's principles and objectives state that satisfying external customers is the primary focus. An or-ganizationwide awareness can be subtle and hard to recognize.
Why this internal focus? Top managers might not intend for their organizations to be too focused on internal activities and often express frustration that the company places little importance on the customer. More often than not, this inward focus exists because quality leaders and top managers don't send the signal that customers are important. There may be a lot of talk about customer focus, but leaders must make that talk real through actions. The spectrum of possibilities ranges from a casual or cursory focus on the customer to a true conviction that customers are of paramount importance.
How an organization addresses customers and how leaders mold an organization's behavior in this area can profoundly affect how the goods or services it provides are perceived and valued. When top managers and quality leaders believe customers are of paramount importance, they tend to encourage employees to do their jobs in a way that contributes to customer loyalty. For some, the objective is to ensure that every customer touch point is a positive experience. Let's consider a few aspects of quality management and how they can be addressed to ensure a sharp customer focus:
• Customer requirements.
Organizations that truly listen to the customer rely on more than stated requirements, those qualities a customer must have when making the commitment to buy. Customers also have wants, needs and desires that often go unstated.
Customer data should be analyzed to determine what outcomes are desired by customers so that the organization's products and services can provide them.
It's important to remember that for most products and services, a mixture of stated and unstated customer requirements is normal.
• Qualitypolicy, objectives, processes and alignment.
When an organization is serious about its customer focus, it will ensure that this emphasis is stated in the quality policy, and that objectives related to the importance of customers are defined and deployed throughout the organization.
For every process, an organization must know the stated and unstated requirements of internal and external customers.
• Customer satisfaction measurement.
Any organization that's sensitive to customer satisfaction must go beyond the basic ISO 9001 requirements. Although customer satisfaction has a powerful leverage on profits, many organizations don't have a formalized system for collecting and using customer information. All too often the processes to collect and analyze this information are rudimentary, ad hoc, undocumented, uncontrolled and underused.
The same organization that has a rudimentary system for handling customer data may have a very sophisticated system for handling financial data. There might be an entire finance department, a required set of financial reports, a structured review process and a set of decision-making criteria focused on financial measures.
Certainly modern organizations need good systems for financial and other internal data, but to be competitive they also need good systems for customer data. Customer data have a significant potential effect on both long- and near-term revenues and margins. Such data can help an organization make changes focused on the future, whereas financial reporting data are descriptive of where the organization has been in the past.
Of course, other aspects of the QMS, such as training and management review, can also reinforce customer focus, but quality leaders must help top managers obtain, understand and use customer data. Without this tool, the QMS might achieve internal objectives but isn't likely to enhance customer satisfaction.
Note: This article is based in part on chapter 3 of 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).
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 and lead delegate for the United States to the International Organization for Standardization committee responsible for the ISO 9000 series of standards.
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