New Paradigm Consulting specialises in streamlining management systems and here is a tip for you to reduce some of the administration associated with meeting the requirements of ISO 9001 : 2015.

Many organisations are advised that they need to send customer satisfaction surveys to their clients in order to meet the requirements of the standard. It is not a requirement of the standard to get customer feedback through customer satisfaction surveys.

Surveys can be an effective method of gaining an insight into customer satisfaction, but they cost time and resources to put together, to send out to the customer, to follow up when no response is received and to analyse. In the real world, you may not get enough genuine responses to make the process worthwhile. If you are sending these out to simply pass your ISO 9001 : 2015 audit, it is a waste of effort.

The standard simply asks that you obtain customer feedback and review customer satisfaction. This can be through qualitative data such as email communications, minuted face to face customer meetings, letters of recommendation and publications etc. From a quantitative perspective, you can also analyse in-house financial data to look at repeat orders per customer etc.

A review of this information with evidence of actions arising from the review will be received a lot better by your auditor than a few customer satisfaction surveys that have not been analysed. Not to mention this will cost less resources to complete and your organisation is more likely to get value from the process.

Please contact New Paradigm Consulting if this situation is familiar to you and we can discuss other opportunities for streamlining your quality management system with the emphasis on reducing the effort required to manage it. If your system has been operational from before 2015, there are likely to be many opportunities to streamline the system and reduce the management effort.