2003 Q1 Customer Satisfaction and ISO Quality Standards
Since its 1987 introduction, the series of international quality standards collectively called ISO 9000 has become an increasingly important business requirement for quality improvement. While ISO 9000 certification is not a legal mandate, it has become a basic competitive prerequisite for many companies doing business in today’s global economy. About 400,000 organizations are currently ISO-certified and that number is expected to grow significantly over the next several years.
The International Organization for Standardization, the governing body of ISO standards, requires that all ISO 9001:1994 compliant companies recertify under a new set of requirements included in ISO:2000. Monitoring of customer perception as to whether the organization has met customer requirements is a new requirement for ISO 9000:2000. Common methods of measuring customer perceptions are market surveys, customer perception surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, analysis of customer complaints, etc.
Regardless of whether or not your company must meet the new ISO requirements for monitoring customer satisfaction, it is just plain good business to understand what your customers are thinking in a concrete, quantifiable manner. Satisfied customers exhibit longer and higher lifetime value because they serve as advocates winning over new customers.
A customer satisfaction survey is one initiative with results that impact virtually every department in a company. This requires a formalized process to act upon the findings of a survey. Without such a process, the findings probably will not be widely used. That’s because no one department owns all the findings of a customer satisfaction survey.
Going through the motions of conducting a customer satisfaction will rarely net you the results you need if you don’t use the right measurements. There are five things you can do to improve customer measures. A constructive view of measurement is needed if this process is to play a continued role as a significant tool for decision-makers.
- Link customer measurement directly with specific organizational objectives.
- Establish the ownership of measurement content where it belongs. The underlying responsibility for content development should focus on the actual users of the information that is to be collected.
- Make use of more direct and aggressive loyalty and retention measures. Very few organizations have established a clear link between what their customers say and what they actually do.
- Reinforce the use of customer measurement as a process improvement and communications tool. Increase the use of follow-up data gathering efforts after the distribution and analysis of more traditional measures.
- Consider your measurement approach from the customer’s perspective. The process of involving customers in measurement development and deployment can be very straightforward and easy to execute for most organizations.