In this article, you will understand a little more about Customer Focus and the importance of focusing on customer satisfaction and how it helps your business grow.
One of the basic principles in quality management is to focus on customer needs and expectations. After all, the customer list is a parameter to understand and identify how your company is progressing in the market.
Due to the high competitiveness in the market, the numerous options of products and services available, your company needs to stand out. And for that, focusing on satisfying your customer’s needs is fundamental, something that will add value to your organization.
However, achieving a truly customer-centric focus requires a lot of planning and involves seeking out and delivering unique experiences to your customers. Likewise, ensuring customer satisfaction is not always an easy task. And that’s where the role of a good quality management system and the implementation of an ISO standard comes in.
Ensuring a customer-focused culture and implementing a system that integrates it is what will make the speech get off the ground and turn into good deliverables for stakeholders. Now, with the proper introductions done, let’s better understand what true customer focus is and how ISO 9001 can help your company.
After all, what is customer focus?
Customer focus is nothing more than a company strategy to conduct their work to directly meet the demands of their target audience. Focusing on the quality of your service or product is extremely important, but understanding the needs of your customers and meeting them is even more essential, because there is no quality if the product does not meet customer expectations.
By creating a process responsible for identifying demands and putting actions into practice to meet them, the company creates a bond of loyalty with its customers, which ends up contributing to the growth and improvement of the organization.
We all know how important it is to commit, and to commit a lot, to the quality of the services or products we offer; meet deadlines, deliver consistent and truthful information, to provide support when needed, and so on. And the requirements for all these aspects can only be defined through who consumes what we produce: the customer!
How can ISO 9001:2015 contribute to Customer Focus?
Implementing a Quality Monitoring System in your company is a way to meet customer needs and strive to deliver the best results for everyone. The ISO 9001:2015 standard is a tool whose main focus is to organize a system aimed at discovering customer problems and creating products that solve them. All this, of course, always looking for the continuous improvement of the processes.
For ISO 9001, customer focus is a key factor for the company’s improvement and success, as it helps to create more value and trust for its audience. We can analyze this through, for example, item 5.1.2 of the 2015 version. This requirement, entitled “Focus on the Customer”, indicates that the top management is focused on its customers and on meeting their needs.
The standard also states that top management must ensure that customer needs, as well as compliance with the law and regulatory bodies, must be understood and met. The standard also points out that the company must detect risks and opportunities to prevent problems and add value to its business. Last but not least, the standard says that the organization must be attentive to the level of customer satisfaction and how to find opportunities to improve its work.
After analyzing the entire standard, we realized that all its construction and devices exist to help companies focus their operations on the customer and keep them happy with their products and services.
Why is it so important to focus on the customer?
This is a simple line of reasoning: for the company to remain open, it must have customers. Even with customers, you need to earn their trust so that they buy your products again and recommend them to other people.
So, focusing on meeting the demands of your audience is directly related to success and, consequently, to the financial return of your organization. This all seems obvious, doesn’t it? But it is not always that a company decides to focus on the customer.
There is no shortage of examples of companies that, thinking of delivering the best product or service on the market, decide to use more sophisticated and “state-of-the-art” tools or materials. They decide to employ “the latest technology of the moment”. However, these companies will not necessarily be meeting the demand of their customers.
Sometimes the one that seems like such a great idea isn’t really what your customers need. Often they would just like something simple, that would solve a one-off problem. It’s like trying to sell a dozen Ferraris to a small haulage company, no doubt it’s a good car, but does it solve this customer’s problems? That’s why it’s important to know your audience and their demands very well; focus on the customer!
Customer focus can make all the difference for your business!
A company that cares about meeting the expectations of its customers is able to stand out in the market and leverage good results. Well, investing in improvements is not just about identifying them, it’s about actions! And all actions and decisions must always be thought of focusing on good service, focusing on adding value to the service provided to the customers.
For this to happen, we must always remember to invest in quality management! ISO 9001:2015 certification can be essential to differentiate and find opportunities for improvement in this area.
After all we’ve said, one thing is clear: the customer should always be the focus of a company. And QMS can help you in this process. So, what are you waiting for to get certified and make your company a reference in the market? Just click here to start this process!
