To comply with ISO 9001, thus do business in your industry, you are required to run an annual customer satisfaction survey.
Many companies will conduct an annual survey just to “check the box” around ISO 9001 certification. Many ISO companies outsource this process and simply hire either a market research firm to conduct the survey or an expensive independent certification body to audit their conformity to the ISO standard.
That is an easy approach, but it doesn’t offer enduring value in terms of enabling the organization to make continuous improvement to the customer experience – one customer at a time.
A faster and cheaper alternative that offers enduring value is to invite your customers to audit your quality system for themselves utilizing Customer Experience Management (CEM) software – a robust platform to create, distribute and analyze surveys yourself.
The annual ISO survey is the ideal opportunity for companies to leverage rich customer feedback data and combine it with robust Customer Experience Management software to launch a more holistic Voice of Customer program.
Meet ISO objectives and drive ISO improvement measures
ISO 9001 standard does not have any specific criteria for your survey, but it does tell you what you need to do with the results. This is where having an end-to-end Customer Experience Management (CEM) software platform comes in.
The ISO 9001 survey is a combination of questions that collect the data you need to meet ISO 9001 objectives and drive improvement.
A proper ISO 9001 survey asks the right questions that will:
- Determine how well you meet your customers’ expectations
- Enable you to engage with unsatisfied customers to recover from an experience that didn’t meet their expectations
- Identify the main quality of service improvement areas
- Identify your customers’ unmet needs
But don’t stop there.
Leverage the fact that you have received rich customer feedback and take the next step – which is to put that feedback to work in your organization to continuously improve your business. After all, continuous improvement is the single biggest charter in the world of ISO certification and Total Quality Management.
We call this process “closed loop feedback management.” The primary tenet of this process is to close the feedback loop completely by setting up automated alerts based on how respondents answer your ISO customer satisfaction survey.
Utilize CEM software
With advanced CEM software such as PeopleMetrics, you can set conditions based on how respondents answer surveys. When these conditions are met, actions are triggered – such as sending an e-mail, a text message, a support ticket from helpdesk systems like Zendesk, integrating data in Salesforce, or making an API call to another system.
By implementing robust CEM software and closed loop processes, you have now moved way beyond a simple ISO checkbox survey and are now in a position to identify disappointed customers automatically, quickly respond to customer feedback, automate a coordinated follow-up to win back at-risk customers, increase your upsell and cross-sell opportunities with happy customers, and continually improve your operations.
David Rode is an experienced CEO, President & Chief Operations Officer with extensive global experience and a demonstrated track record in the cloud & software-as-a-service industries. Skilled in Operations; Technical Leadership & Product Management; Negotiation; Sales; Customer Relationship Management (CRM); Go-to-market Strategies & Managed/Professional Services, David is a strong strategic and operational leader and holds an MBA in Finance from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
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