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ISO 9001 Certification – Customer Satisfaction
Episode 13 ISO 9001 and Customer Satisfaction
ISO 9001 and Customer Satisfaction
In this episode, host Xavier Francis interviews extensively experienced Murphy Shaw from CORE Business Solutions about customer satisfaction measures. Murphy highlights the importance of gathering customer feedback and leadership’s role in prioritizing customer satisfaction. Murphy also shares a success story about a company whose customer satisfaction was improved by customer feedback.
Core Business Solutions publishes ISO Certification podcast episodes weekly. You can find more episodes here.
Episode 13 Key Content
Hello, everyone, and thanks for listening to the Quality Hub chatting with ISO experts. I’m your host, Xavier Francis, and I’m here with Murphy Shaw, consultant at CORE Business Solutions. So glad you could be here with us today, Murphy.
Thanks, X. Glad to be here.
Awesome. Today’s show is entitled Is the Customer Always Right? where we’ll be discussing customer satisfaction Measures. But first, we’d love to hear a little bit about Murphy and his experience with ISO and consulting. Could you share a little bit with us, Murphy?
Yeah, so I got my start with ISO quite some years ago with a medical packaging company where I got my start with ISO 9001. We are also ISO 13485 at that time, which is the medical side of things. From there, you know, that’s where I gained most of my experience. I think I was in the quality world for about 11 years with that company. Then I transitioned over to the medical device side of things going towards a C and C shop where I learned a little bit more about the FDA and those requirements as well, a little bit closer to the actual implantable device world. And then from there, I was the director of quality for three locations. And then I came here to Core.
Awesome. And you’ve been here, what, about a year and a half now?
No, about two and a half years.
And I know later this year, we are going to have you with someone else speaking about ISO 13485.
Oh, okay.
So we’re going to cover a little bit of medical device stuff a little bit later in 2023. The first question for you is, How should an organization measure customer satisfaction? And what do you find are the most effective methods to get honest, accurate feedback?
Yeah, So it sounds easy to gather customer feedback. However, it’s pretty difficult because, you know, the customers don’t always provide feedback to you.
Right. It’s almost voluntary. So you kind of have to hope they will.
Yeah, exactly. You know, we want to implement the process together. That’s not always good results. But yeah, you know, it’s tough to get the customer’s response. So you kind of have to make it as easy as possible for the customer.
Do you have any suggestions on how to do that?
Yeah. You know, the most common way to do that is to monitor complaints. You know, complaints are still considered feedback. A lot of people do surveys, whether that be online like a SurveyMonkey type system or a hard copy that they email to their customers. But other feedback techniques could include, you know, interviews, you know, calling them up on the phone, asking questions, like I said, online reviews and testimonials, and even just general email communication.
So one of your customers said, Hey, we got a great love for this product just from an email or something like that, or we’ve been having some trouble. Can you help us? That’s all kind of informal, but still can count.
Absolutely. Yeah. Formal or informal, Everything counts as feedback, whether it be negative, neutral, or positive.
Okay, so how does an organization prioritize that as an act on that customer feedback to drive improvements?
The first thing is, you know that feedback per the requirement has to be discussed with the management team. All right. So, that is communicated throughout the organization. So everybody knows what’s going on. Everybody knows what the customer’s perception of them is. And, you know, the management team is required to take that information, discuss it, and say, hey, you know, what can we do to improve our processes?
To make it better, to fix the problem.
Yeah. Yeah. See if we can make any improvement, you know, maybe implement some improvement projects. Something along those lines? Absolutely.
Do you have any specific examples of how you can go through that process?
Yeah. For example, if a customer provides feedback saying they love the functionality of the product, but the physical design isn’t necessarily user-friendly, you know, maybe you initiate a corrective action to go back and, you know, investigate any possible design changes. You know, what can we do to make this more user-friendly?
Right. Right. Now, that’s more from a manufacturing standpoint. What if it’s a service?
Well, yeah. I mean, you take the same type of approach. You know, if you’re delivering a service, you would want to investigate the process of delivering that service. So there’s there’s always a better way to do things. So that’s what you kind of have to take into consideration, whether we can provide a faster service or a higher quality service in some regard.
Maybe response time?
Yeah.
Okay. That makes sense. You mentioned a little bit already, but what role does leadership play to ensure that customer satisfaction is a priority and how do they communicate that through the company?
Like we talked back earlier, you know, that goes through the management review process. Leadership ownership and top management get together routinely to discuss that stuff. And it does have to be driven from the top down when you’re going through that management review process, you know you’re going to be documenting what you guys talk about and what actions are coming out of that. Leadership needs to drive this requirement from the top down and stress the importance of collecting, monitoring, and reacting to customer satisfaction.
So keeping the workforce engaged in regards to needed improvement from the customer feedback. Is there a specific way to communicate that through the company?
Well, there are several types of ways to communicate that to the rest of the organization, you know? Number one, we can post the minutes from the management review around the facility, you know, so people all the employees have access to what’s being talked about. Also, the department managers should be taking that information back to their team and discussing it with them. You know, if we’re having trouble with on-time delivery, that has to be communicated to everybody. Say, hey, this is happening. So everybody has to be aware of it. And that opens the door for opportunities for everybody to come to the table and say, Hey, we could do this. We could do that to improve on-time delivery.
So really communicating the problem to those that are doing the job and getting and gaining some of the insight from them on how to make it better.
Yeah, that’s the best way to get employee engagement.
Okay. How do you measure the success of your customer satisfaction efforts? And what metrics do you use to track the progress? Could you go through some of that stuff?
So the best way to measure the success of customer satisfaction is to monitor the data and trend it. Right. So as you’re as you’re receiving the data, you’re graphing it, you can see a trend where it’s heading. And then after you make improvements, like you were saying earlier, you can witness that. To see if the trend has tapered off or started going in the other direction as a result of the changes that you’ve implemented. The improvements.
Right. Right. So we have a software called CORE, which helps you with some of that. I know we have some dashboards and I believe it’s a customer feedback form where we can track some of that data and look at it from a reporting standpoint to kind of gauge
it over time, trend it over certain periods, and so on.
Yes, So we have that customer feedback form in CORE, which allows our users to very easily take the feedback and put it into the system. And we can create charts from that. You can show all the positive, all the negative, all the neutral stuff, pie charts, and very easy to trend that. But on top of that one, we also have a quality objective tracker form as well, where we can create that dashboard. Every time you log in to the core, it pops up in your face and you can see almost live data and monitor.
But it’s really important to be able to see and visualize how you’re doing. You know, everybody looks at the data differently. Some people want to see numbers. Some people want to see charts. Some people want to see graphs. And this helps you do that. So this is something clearly that the manager needs to focus on with objectives and metrics and so on.
Yes, it needs to be quantifiable and measurable, as we discussed earlier. So, yes, management needs to be able to focus on the numbers like that to gauge whether or not our processes are effective. They’re working as intended. You can do that in several different ways. You know, whether you are monitoring complaints coming in. You can set a goal for yourself. Let’s say, hey, I don’t want more than two complaints per month. So you can monitor that data. Or if you’re surveying with questions, you can rate those questions on a 1 to 5 scale. And, you know, they can be weighted. You can quantify the data that way. You know, take an average of those questions. So you set goals and targets for yourself for those types of things, which ultimately gets reported up into management review.
Right. So your data is going to help you see what you need to focus on. Then you can set your targets and goals based on that and track it with those same metrics.
It’s going to it’s going to indicate your problem areas.
Awesome. We know it’s important to track these over time to get an idea of if you’re continuing to get good feedback or high scores. So let’s say you’ve made those changes. Do you find that you might need to change what you’re asking your customers as you might see improvement? One area then trying to gain metrics and another?
Yes, your measure should be a living thing, constantly evolving and being changed up, so it remains current and accurate to your business. If you’re constantly meeting your metrics for satisfaction or complaints, maybe that’s not as serious as originally thought, right? Or maybe you took those improvements too, and you made some significant leaps in that area. You should consider revising your metrics to something else that’s more pressing.
So maybe you’ve not had an issue with on-time delivery in six months. It’s time to look at something else and focus on something else that might be a deficiency that you can get better at. Ask different questions.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Whether you’re you’re constantly meeting your goal, you can elevate your goal. Let’s say you’re on time delivery targets 90%. You’re constantly at 95. Let’s bump that up to 96%. You know, to increase your goals or if maybe you’re at 100% every time you don’t have any problems with on-time delivery. Let’s switch gears and create a new category where our efficiencies are.
Okay, That makes sense. Again, that’s going to be something leadership needs to look at, analyze, and say, okay, now it’s time to move on to this or raise this goal, and so on. This is helpful. So with all your experience in this, do you have a story of a company that saw some improvement in their customer satisfaction?
Yes, I do. One of our clients that I have recently worked with with Core was manufacturing a life-saving device. It was a breathing apparatus. You know, they had a universal fit product that they manufactured, and it worked great. You know, there were no there’s no issues regarding functionality or anything like that. But through their customer satisfaction process, they have learned a lot of their customers were giving them feedback on why don’t have different sizes for children infants, adults, toddlers, you know, those types of different sizes because although it was working, it could improve the seal to fit because everybody’s different.
Right. Right. Even though it’s universal, it doesn’t mean everybody’s mouth or nose is going to be universal.
Correct. So that led to more product offerings in different sizes for the company. And it helped the customers out.
That’s great. And I’m assuming they were able to sell more, improve how much they’re able to do because now they it’s more customized.
Absolutely. Yes. The sales went through the roof because he was selling, you know, multiple sizes. And, you know, the positive side of things is more people’s lives were being saved.
That’s great. That’s great. That certainly did increase business sales and life savings is incredible. Well, this has been helpful, Murphy. I want to thank you for being here. And I know our listeners can take a lot away from this, maybe implement some of the concepts into their customer satisfaction methods. Thank you so much.
Thank you, X. Yeah, this was very good. Hope to come back.
Awesome. We’ll have you later in the year. We’ll talk about 1345. And thank you all for listening to quality up today. We hope you enjoyed it and have some new ideas to help you with your business. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the Quality Hub on your favorite podcast app so you can catch the next episode when it drops. Thanks so much and have a great day.