Customer Focus
If you’re considering writing an ISO9001:2000 quality manual for your organization, it’s good to include a section on “Customer Focus”. ISO is all about satisfying your customer. No matter what kind of organization you have, in one way or another there is some sort of “customer” that you want to satisfy.
A necessary part of your ISO quality system is to describe how you determine customer requirements.
It may or may not be readily apparent how you determine customer requirements. You might have a formal process, such as hiring a marketing research firm to survey potential customers as to what they are looking for. Automobile manufacturers do this all the time. Or, you might have a less formal process. If you’re a small company developing motorcycle products, you might not have the budget for formal market research. Maybe you talk to motorcycle enthusiasts at races and other gatherings.
Think about how it is that you decide what your customers want, which is, of course, the same as deciding what it is you’re going to supply. Write it down. You may not realize that you already do this process. Simply thinking about it and writing down will give you food for thought about how you might improve this process, increase customer satisfaction, which will lead to increase sales.
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