1. Customer Focus
The first quality management principle begins with the customer. Having a customer focus ensures that your customer receives the benefit of a product or service you are offering. This lies at the centre of most organisations, because without customers, your organisation will serve no purpose to exist.
Ultimately, your customers are fundamental to your organisation and therefore you need to understand the importance of achieving quality and strive to do this you must have a customer focus.
Customer focus involves the organisation;
- Identify your customers (both internal and external)
- Ensuring everyone across the organisation has a strong grasp on your customers, suppliers, and competitors of the organisation
- Identify your customer's needs by constantly seeking feedback from them
- Be willing to make changes based upon this feedback, and respond to customers
Examples of Customer focus
If you look at successful organisations that have focused on quality, Apple immediately springs to mind.
Apple has an unwavering focus on the customer and the customer experience with their products and services. Even if you’re not an Apple fan yourself, it’s impossible to deny that people who love Apple really love Apple.
Apple puts the customer front and centre, and is rewarded with enormous loyalty. Take a leaf from Apple’s book and consider the impact of every part of your quality management system on the customer. Yes, every part.
Customer focus here at Mango
In creating our own quality management system (QMS) at Mango we debated and discussed – and continue to debate and discuss – these questions:
- When developing our software we ask ourselves “who is the customer for this feature?”
- When supporting the product we always consider “what is the customer asking?”
- When implementing the software on-site we determine “what are the customer requirements?”
- During inductions of staff we talk about “what will make us successful in the eyes of the customer?”
The requirements of your customers aren’t something you leave to the marketing department so that you can focus on calibration, training and perhaps safety.
Once you’ve worked out these customer requirements, you can then build that into your QMS.
Following that, it’s a matter of doing what ISO talks about, namely striving to exceed customer expectations. Exceeding expectations will help you achieve customer satisfaction and earn a ton of customer love (think of those millions of devoted Apple fans).
The other Quality management Principles are:
- Leadership
- Engagement of people
- Process Approach
- Improvement
- Evidence based decision making
- Relationship Management
