How Important Are Your Customers?

Your QMS should focus on more than internal operations.

Most organizations have a number of stakeholders. These include customers, owners, employees, regulators, the local community and the public at large. Organizations have internal processes to run, owners to satisfy, regulations to comply with and myriad other concerns. Given all these responsibilities, it's easy to take the customer for granted.

This is unfortunate because almost everyone will admit that customers are important. Without them, an organization has no reason to exist. Customers provide the cash that enables the organization to continue to operate. Even in the nonprofit world or in government organizations, customers are important. Although there might be no direct profit motive associated with the products or services provided by these institutions, without customers there would be no need for the organization.

How an organization addresses customer focus, and how company leaders mold the organization's behavior in this area, can profoundly affect the perception of the value of the goods or services it provides. The spectrum of possibilities ranges from a casual or cursory focus on the customer to a firm conviction that customers are of paramount importance. Where that conviction flourishes, top managers tend to encourage all employees in the organization to do their jobs in a way that contributes to achieving customer satisfaction. More enlightened organizations foster a culture in which everyone strives to obtain customer loyalty by ensuring that every customer touch point offers a positive experience.

But what do customers really have to do with the quality management system? How can an organization use its QMS to enhance its focus on external customers? ISO 9001 encourages an organization to focus on its customers in several ways:

• Customer requirements. Identifying and understanding both stated and unstated customer requirements is a basic requirement of ISO 9001.

• Process approach. Adopted by many organizations when implementing the 1987 and 1994 versions of ISO 9001, a process approach is necessary to comply with ISO 9001:2000. The standard requires that the processes needed to meet customer requirements be identified, resourced and controlled. The most important aspects of every job and of all work in the organization are related to knowing that internal and external customer requirements are being satisfied. This means that for every process in the organization, it's necessary to know the requirements of internal and external customers, have controls in place to monitor and measure process performance, and monitor and measure product and service conformance to ensure that the organization is meeting requirements.

• Policy, objectives and alignment. These are required for any business, but even more important is ensuring that this emphasis is part of the organization's culture. Objectives related to the importance of customers that are defined and deployed throughout the organization can help.

• Management review. This is a powerful tool for ensuring that everyone and everything in the organization is focused on the customer's satisfaction and creating or expanding customer loyalty. Management review shouldn't focus only on day-to-day activities. Rather, it should identify internal and customer-related issues, define improvement plans and allocate improvement resources.

• Internal audit. This should focus on ensuring that processes and people are functioning to achieve results valued by the customer. This can't be done until auditors are trained. Experience is necessary to appreciate the outcomes expected by customers and to understand how the organization can ensure that those outcomes take place.

• Customer satisfaction. This is all about customer perception. ISO 9001 requires organizations to "…monitor information relating to customer perception as to whether the organization has met customer requirements." The information should be analyzed so that the organization can better understand what changes to make to improve customer perception.

In many respects, the quality management system is an organization's best platform for understanding customers and meeting their needs. The trick is to use the QMS to change the focus from internal operational controls to meeting customer requirements throughout the organization. Organizations that do this well are likely to succeed.

Note: This article is based on chapter 3 of 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).

About the author
John E. (Jack) West is a consultant, business advisor and author with more than 30 years of experience in a wide variety of industries. He is 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 quality management standards.