How to Carry Out ?Customer Focus? on All Parts of Management System?

[cuadra - 2010]

Re: How to Carry Out “Customer Focus” on All Parts of Management System?

Dear zerodefect:

I am going to answer the questions by assuming that you jut want to be in compliance with the intent of the ISO 9001:2000 standard, clause 5.2 Customer Focus. In practice, you may need to do other things in order to delight your customers.

The clause 5.2 is not a process; it is a general statement that requires that you read both clauses 7.2.1 and 8.2.1

The clause 7.2.1 requires that you determine the requirements specified by the customer, etc (i.e. read a, b, c, d). Depending on your organization this may involve marketing, sales, engineering, etc. What other companies typically do is to identify your intra-company transactions (i.e. e-mails, request for quotes, quotes, P.O., evaluations, etc) to achieve the business objectives and a process is defined in order to ensure that repeatability of results is achieved.

The clause 8.2.1 requires that your organization determine the methods to capture and use information relating to customer perception. This data gathering can take many forms: scorecards from costumers, contracting customer surveys, responding to customer complains, phone calls asking for feedback (i.e. you can sample a group of customers), etc are just some examples of perception gathering tools. You can use of this information as an input to Management Review, clause 5.6

Hope this helps.

Cuadra

 

[Manix]

Re: How to Carry Out “Customer Focus” on All Parts of Management System?

I cannot comprehend a discussion about "luck" having any relevance to a discussion about customer focus. Standards and the work of the "Gurus" do not exist purely for our entertainment. They are there to offer a solid, and in many cases proven base on which to manage a business.

I would perhaps term luck as something beyond the control of the organisation. This can both have adverse as well as positive effects. If you take this description, perhaps we could more accurately term it 'Risk'. Is the basis of management standards, corporate and business planning not about 'Risk Management'? Managing this risk enables us to identify areas of risk/luck and harness the good opportunities and mitigate the bad. There will always be an element of unknown, but like I have said in a previous post, it is those organisations that anticipate the most unknown factors and plan for their occurrence that are generally successful.

A total reliance on luck disregards the use of many tools used for the management and planning tools we discuss here everyday. This disregard would be like digging a hole with your hands, whilst a spade lay on the ground next you.

If you need evidence of effectiveness you need to research their company reports and analyse the methods these organisations use with specific reference to customer focus.

 

[Jen Kirley]

Re: How to Carry Out “Customer Focus” on All Parts of Management System?

I cannot comprehend a discussion about "luck" having any relevance to a discussion about customer focus. Standards and the work of the "Gurus" do not exist purely for our entertainment. They are there to offer a solid, and in many cases proven base on which to manage a business.

I would perhaps term luck as something beyond the control of the organisation. This can both have adverse as well as positive effects. If you take this description, perhaps we could more accurately term it 'Risk'. Is the basis of management standards, corporate and business planning not about 'Risk Management'? Managing this risk enables us to identify areas of risk/luck and harness the good opportunities and mitigate the bad. There will always be an element of unknown, but like I have said in a previous post, it is those organisations that anticipate the most unknown factors and plan for their occurrence that are generally successful.

A total reliance on luck disregards the use of many tools used for the management and planning tools we discuss here everyday. This disregard would be like digging a hole with your hands, whilst a spade lay on the ground next you.

If you need evidence of effectiveness you need to research their company reports and analyse the methods these organisations use with specific reference to customer focus.

I suppose luck happens, but in today's climate I expect that stumbling into a new invention (like the sticky note's glue that was supposed to be superglue) is much more likely than stumbling into customer satisfaction in service.

A customer's unspoken expectation is unspoken until the customers are asked what they want. So often this inquiry does not happen, and follow up with success data is even more rare.

I agree that individual companies could be researched. One might also find what looks like case studies in the Baldrige Award winners web site, but actual examples might be buried in the applications and not found in the summaries.

 

[ywang]

Re: How to Carry Out “Customer Focus” on All Parts of Management System?

Eh, seems like there's quite a bit of verbal sword play in this thread. I'm not sure if we can't agree to disagree or define succintly and come to agreement?

This is quite a sensitive issue for me, as I expect for many companies and quality individuals. Here are some of my thoughts.

It's mostly about communication for me, at least at this stage for my company. I can never seem to get enough information out of our Sales guys, not even enough to answer their questions properly. Can't always blame Sales, either. Our customers, in most cases, have no idea what they want.

So let me try to brainstorm a little and break this down,

1. We have not done our homework. The first thing, in my mind, is a marketing analysis. Sales should approach the customers knowing quite well what they want. We don't do this enough and are suffering for it.

2. We don't spend enough time with our customers. My Sales guys spend one hour meetings on a monthly basis with most of our clients. Hardly enough to understand their stated requirements, much less unstated or unknown requirements.

My attitude is generally, "do you know the color of your customer's underwear? Do you know his kid's birthday? Do you know their org chart?" If you don't know them well on a personal and professional level, it's so much harder to communicate.

3. We don't always demonstrate how much we care. For a relatively small company, we appear to not have the resources to provide on-call service for all customer claims.

My quality mentor keeps telling me, "if you go over there and spend time and look at their process, you'll figure things out they won't know themselves." This sounds like a reliable way to discover unstated requirements, not to mention it'll give them the warm and fuzzy feeling.

Recently we sent someone over to the customer on a claim. He found they wanted something completely different than what they complained about. That confirms the above comment, and makes me wonder if this second time is any good.

I think there's definitely a place you can reach from where you can have solutions ready before your customer raises the complaint. It's not magical. It's just quite an investment.

It's also Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, QA, Top Management. Everyone has to contribute.

Now if you take that a step further and apply to internal customers, that's another bucket I won't spill today.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

Re: How to Carry Out “Customer Focus” on All Parts of Management System?

My attitude is generally, "do you know the color of your customer's underwear?

:mg:. This line is drawn way too far...

 

[JaneB]

Re: How to Carry Out “Customer Focus” on All Parts of Management System?

:mg:. This line is drawn way too far...

Ooh, yes. That would be rather too much information for me