Any business, be it B2C or B2B, exists to solve its customers’ pain point(s). Only those businesses that successfully deliver not only customer satisfaction but also customer delight truly thrive and grow. The process of delivering customer satisfaction and delight becomes even more difficult with scale and size.
Additionally, customer satisfaction is a constantly shifting goal post. While a qualitative analysis may indicate whether customers are satisfied or not, businesses must also be able to measure this in quantifiable terms. They should be able to address any complaints or reasons for dissatisfaction in a meaningful way, communicate it with the customer and continue to maintain and improve on their service levels. Your automation platform must make it extremely easy to conduct a data-driven analysis of customer satisfaction, using customer experience scores, reduction in complaints, etc.
ISO 9001 equips businesses in this aspect too. It enables companies to implement a process for assessing their success in meeting the quality standards of their products and services as per customer expectations.
Monitoring Customer Satisfaction
ISO 9001 requires customer satisfaction to be closely monitored, documented, reviewed and analyzed. The insight gained from this process is used for taking corrective action and impacts everything from design and development to process validation.
The ISO 9001 Customer Satisfaction Process includes:
- Defining customer satisfaction
- Setting up a timeline
- Identifying a method to collect customer data
- Document the data correctly
- Review the documented data periodically
- Create solutions for improving customer satisfaction
- Assign roles and responsibilities
- Communicate the improvement to the customer
- Ensure continuous improvement
How to Monitor and Measure Customer Satisfaction
Customers will sometimes provide feedback directly, giving the business an opportunity to improve. But most likely, they will simply switch to another vendor or supplier. Therefore, it is essential for businesses to proactively seek customer feedback and monitor customer satisfaction.
Some of the ways in which ISO 9001 enables businesses to seek customer feedback include:
- Well-designed customer satisfaction surveys
- Reviewing customer data
- Identifying customer data patterns
- Handling complaints effectively
Automating the entire process using a quality management system will simplify the process and also make it visible across the enterprise for the different functions to respond appropriately and in a timely manner.
For instance, a QMS such as the one from ComplianceQuest, built on the scalable and cloud-based Salesforce.com platform, has an in-built Complaint Management feature for improving customer satisfaction. This allows businesses to listen to customers, take CAPA – corrective action preventive action – to resolve the issue and prevent future occurrences, and make regulatory submissions on time where required.
The key functions of the CQ complaint management solution includes:
- Complaint Initiation for registering the complaint coming in from multiple sources such as phone, fax, mail, email, or the web.
- Complaint Triaging for reviewing the complaints, performing a risk assessment and routing it for further investigation to the relevant departments and personnel.
- Product History Review for analyzing past non-conformance, CAPAs, inspections, etc., created against it and its outcome.
- Investigation and Root Cause Analysis by a cross-sectional team from single or multiple sites and subject matter experts from the supply chain. The solution allows for documentation and identifies if the failed component was from a supplier, in which case SCAR is triggered.
- Customer Communication is made easier through the collaboration capabilities of the module across the organization and generating responses that can be emailed to the appropriate personnel within or outside the organization using pre-defined templates.
Some of the other features that make this a complete solution for customer satisfaction include Regulatory Reporting and Submissions, CAPA Evaluation, Collaboration, Mobile Access and Reporting and Analytics.
If you would like to improve customer delight and align your system better with ISO 9001, contact us now.
