# 003 Customer Focus

CUSTOMER FOCUS

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is a part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.

Who is not familiar with the above quote of Mahatma Gandhi? There can be no better quote on customer focus than the one given above. For any organization in today’s competitive environment, developing true customer focus is not an option but a necessity for survival.

Customers today are very well informed and keep themselves up to date and abreast of things that are going on. They are more discerning and demand products and services that are of very high quality. They can not be easily satisfied or taken for granted.

All these make it important to have a strong customer focus (Clause 5.2). The key to building customer focus is the ability not only to know the present but anticipate and meet or exceed the future needs and expectations of:

·         Existing loyal customers

·         Potential customers

·         Dissatisfied customers  and

·         Competitors’  loyal customers

Customers are people just like us and they are human too. Even if an organization, it is made up of people. One needs to learn to “Think like a customer” and question oneself on what he/she would have liked, if roles were reversed. Know them, cherish them and be fair to them.

Certain fundamental principles to be kept in mind while dealing with customers are:

• Never promise what you can not deliver.
• Keep whatever promises have been made.
• Try to give a little more than what you have promised and/or what they require or expect.
• Respect and honour basic rights which every customer is entitled to.

With this focus, determine the product requirements (Clause 7.2.1). It is easier said than done. Sometimes it is difficult to even know who our ultimate customers are. Most of the participants in the Lead Auditor Training courses I conduct give out identify ‘children’ as customers for a School. When I point out the maxim ‘children walk to School and run back home’ they realize how far off the mark they are. If knowing who our  customers are difficult, determining their requirements are much more difficult. The requirements, more often than not, are not stated. Customers take it for granted that their requirements are known to the organization. In the case of engineering industries it is easier to make all the specifications clear by way of drawing, specifications, reference to standards, providing samples etc. But in the case of consumer goods and services unstated needs assume greater importance. A very good example could be expectations regarding hygienic conditions while serving the food items.

Further if any laws of the land are applicable to the products it must be adhered to strictly. An organization that does not follow regulatory requirements cannot be expected to follow voluntary requirements like ISO 9001 in the true spirit.

There could be some industry specific requirements like for example Automobile, Aerospace, Chemical, Nuclear, Education, Health or Food sector. Finally some specific requirements coming out of organisations own Policy and Core values. All these requirements also needs to be taken into account and reviewed (Clause 7.2.2) for completeness and ability to meet them. ISO 9001 requires a mandatory record to be maintained of “the results of review and actions arising from the review”.

Then Plan how these needs can be met and produce and deliver as per the plan. The cycle is not yet complete! Find out whether the customer is satisfied, how much satisfied or is having complaints (Clause 8.2.1). Obtaining feedback is an important process in itself. Good guidance on feedback process is published by APG which is reproduced in a separate posting in this series. It is possible that even when one has delivered a reasonably good quality product it need not necessarily result in high level of satisfaction. Therefore putting in place an effective process for monitoring customer satisfaction is part of the customer focus, a vital part at that.

Quality, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. Rather in the mind of the customer. It is therefore subjective. And human beings being what they are, satisfaction assumes complex proportions. Whether the conclusion is ‘acceptable or unacceptable’, ‘right or wrong’, ‘reasonable or unreasonable’, ‘just or unjust’, ‘logical or illogical’, ‘real or imaginary’ does not matter. Satisfaction, by definition, is that perceived by the customer. There is no scope to disagree with this perception. It is their opinion/perception and only that counts and is final. It is therefore very important that feedback mechanism and analysis of data (Clause 8.4) be very robust.

Monitoring and measuring this customer satisfaction is no doubt important but it is basically an activity of post mortem. Therefore it is very important to have a programme of customer care and support which alone will ensure right customer focus and relationships.

Customer care requires instilling a feeling of confidence in customers that the organization really likes and values them. Confidence building involves two principles:

1.      Keep your customers coming back not your products.

2.      Customer complaints are opportunities to convert dissatisfied customers into satisfied or even delighted customers.

Often dissatisfaction happens not due to the quality issues with the product themselves but due to unavoidable extraneous factors which are situations beyond the control of an organization such as

• the competitors raising their level of product quality thereby lowering the organization’s quality level relatively

• the competitors  raising their level of ‘Customer Care and Support’

• the competitors play foul to take away the organization’s regular customers.

It is therefore important to pay attention to the way in which the products are delivered. How the interfaces are managed and how customer as a human is dealt with. Our culture while emphasizing the need to speak the Truth (Satyam) stresses the importance of delivering it with care (Priyam).Not only that, it extols delivering only those that are Good (Hitam). Replace ‘truth’ with ‘quality product’, core essence of customer focus is thus fully addressed in these three simple words – Satyam, Priyam and Hitam.

                    

According to ISO 9000 a customer is one who receives the “Product”. That is to say anyone on whom our product has an effect, to include intermediate stages through whom the product passes through or the end user if our immediate customer happens to be not the end user. Thus the word customer includes at one end of the spectrum, even the people working within the organization to the entire society in which the Organisation operates which is the other end of the spectrum. Thus concept of internal customer/supplier relationship needs to be built for a successful implementation of QMS. Service to the customer is incomplete without an orientation of service to society and this must also be essentially fulfilled and form part of the customer focus. This is the ultimate Corporate Social Responsibility which makes an organization a Responsible Corporate Citizen.

It is of interest here to note that the definition of quality given by CQI includes ‘innovation and care’ as depicted in the diagram below:

  

I have carried out review of QMS documents of more than 400 organisations for ISO 9001 certification. Barring a few, they are all alike and just a copy of clause 5.2 of ISO 9001. It is actually a violation of copy right act!! Addressing Customer Focus should reveal application of fundamental principles discussed above. In fact organization will be better off not documenting anything against clause 5.2 rather than repeat parrot like the clause of the ISO standard word for word. There is no need for documenting anything on Customer Focus. What really required is for the organization to demonstrate that it has customer focus.