Customer Focus Clause 5.1.2 – Elaboration of sub-clause

This clause (Clause 5.2 Customer Focus ) is a summary of the things which are related to a customer that top management must concentrate upon.

As per the standard, these are three things that have to be focused on by top management:

1. Customer requirements – clause 8.2
2. Risk and opportunities – clause 6.1
3. Customer satisfaction – clause 9.1.2

Now the fact is that these are all separate clauses that are referred to in the standard in various places. But here they are written in this clause to show actually what is related to customer focus.

If the management wants to play their part in customer focus, they have to look closely into implementing these clauses.

Here I am going to describe the summary of actually what these clauses mean.

Customer requirements

It is the responsibility of the leadership to ensure that the procedure for customer requirements is in process, which includes:

• the process of sales and marketing, 
• customer inquiries are been received, 
• scrutiny of the inquiry, 
• understanding the customer order, 
• proper agreement of the requirement between the customer and the company, and 
• finally ensuring that these requirements are met and fulfilled

We will further be going to study this process in detail when we are going to understand the clause (8.2 Requirements for products and services)

Risk and opportunities

Top management must also focus that the risk and opportunities that can:

1. affect product and services
2. ability to enhance customer satisfaction

Must be considered and addressed!

So all those risks which are directly related to products, and services and can affect customer stagflation by any means must be considered by the top management. 

It is suggested that as an act of “customer focus” top management should closely focus and participate in such meetings in which risks are been discussed. 

From the auditing perspective you can question top management if they are participating in risk management meetings, the evidence of those meetings as well.

Customer satisfaction 

Top management must show leadership in focusing on the enhancement of customer satisfaction. Here the keyword is “enhancement”, yes fulfilling the customer requirement is necessary. But, the real deal is to enhance or increase customer satisfaction by bringing continuous improvement.

Customer satisfaction can be gauged through various parameters:

1. accuracy of the product or service
2. customer complain handling
3. delivery on time
4. responsiveness of the customer inquiry team
5. customer feedback forms

Further detail on customer feedback will be discussed in clause 9.1.2 in which we will discuss the overall methodology of getting customer feedback.