Clause 8.2.1 Customer satisfaction

To The Leaders

"If you give a team member customer feedback, you focus them for a day. If you teach a team member how to "ask" for customer feedback, you focus them for a lifetime!"

Probably one of the most crucial categories of information is the satisfaction of customers. Since customers determine the future of organizations. It needs to be determined how satisfied they are. In order to do this, organizations need to know which issues are important for their customers and then define how they will measure whether the customer are satisfied with these issues.

One way of getting information about how satisfied customers are is to monitor the customer complaints. However, it is important to realize that this will give a very limited picture. First, it is quite common that only a small portion of dissatisfied customers actually complain. Second, customer complaints do not give any information about the satisfied customers.

Customer satisfaction can be objective and subjective. Examples of objective information are:

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  Did the customer receive product on time, as required?


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  Was the shipment (delivery) complete?

How to measure customer satisfaction:

There are several ways of measuring customer satisfaction. Examples are:

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  Questionnaire and surveys: This is relatively cost effective way of measuring customer satisfaction. But the down-side is that the response may be low.


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  Direct communication with customers: This is much more time consuming, but it is an excellent way of getting to know the needs of customer, and the method itself can contribute to raising customer satisfaction.


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  Reports of consumer organizations: This information gives a good overview, but is not always available and seldom gives information about individual customers.
  

The one of the most popular way to measure customer satisfaction is to prepare a questionnaire considering the needs of the customer and product requirements as identified in clause 7.2.1. Following requirements should also be covered in the questionnaire:

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  Response to complaints / suggestions


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  Response of telephone attendant


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  Ease of communication, effectiveness of communication arrangements (in clause 7.2.3 effective customer communication are required and here you can measure the effectiveness of those arrangements), etc.

There is no need to get feed back from all customers, a response taken based on random sampling may provide similar results if proper random selection technique is followed. The random selection of customer should cover majority of product range of the organization and should represent the customer base of the organization. The organizations which are ancillaries to only one customer or sole supplier to only one company will find it easy to implement the requirement of this clause as they will be required to take feedback from only one customer.

My experience shows that customer is hesitant of giving the feedback for one or the other reason. But to meet the demand of the standard, there was no way out. Organizations had to go to the customer and ask "how am I performing?

2008 edition changed the things, A note at the end of clause states that monitoring customer perception may include obtaining input from sources such as customer satisfaction surveys, customer data on delivered product quality, user opinion surveys, lost business analysis, compliments, warranty claims, dealer reports.

This clarification will help organizations:

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  who do not get any formal feedback from the customers.


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  can not afford the expenditure


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  are operating in a industry segment, where customer satisfaction surveys are not practical


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  who are ancillaries to other organizations and have only one customer.


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  many others

Organizations can now define a procedure, customer satisfaction level is measured by consolidating results from one or more types of data such as customer data on delivered product quality, user opinion surveys, lost business analysis, compliments, warranty claims, dealer reports instead of only customer satisfaction surveys.

External Document Reference: Documentation Kit

Methodology Customer Satisfaction Survey
Customer Feedback Form

Additional Key words: customer satisfaction survey, customer feedback