Many of you have probably had the occasional insane day when you thought: “This job would be so much easier if we didn’t have customers to deal with.” Apart from the demands for price concessions and the requests for unreasonable deliveries, there are a whole group of customer traits that can drive us batty.
As an auditor, I get to hear about all sorts of problems that have arisen because of something out of the company’s control—something that was caused by a customer’s error, failure or omission. After listening, I direct them back to the language of the standard. ISO 9001 doesn’t have an escape clause for when the customer screws up. It doesn’t say that it’s okay to guess at customer requirements if they don’t give you adequate information or that you’re off the hook for any other customer-spawned snafu.
With few exceptions, you can’t blame the customer for your failure to fulfill their requirements. The attempt to abdicate responsibility is particularly egregious in those instances where you have long established relationships with clients.
Some of the practices that regularly affect fulfillment of the customer contract are:
In each of these instances, the organization throws up its hands and says, “It’s not our fault. This customer does this to us all the time.” As with everything else that goes awry, assigning fault is a fruitless pursuit. Blaming the customer gets you nowhere. The customer may not always be right, but the customer is always the customer, and without customers you’re out of business. So get over it and decide what you’re going to do.
Since you already have a track record with a customer, you should have data about their practices that create obstacles to your ability to serve them. Look to your processes and the ISO 9001 requirements for guidance. Three sub-clauses should help you out. Consider the following:
7.2.3 Customer communication.
This last bullet links directly to the next ISO 9001 requirement on the list: analysis of data.
8.4 Analysis of data
The analysis of data does more than just provide ammunition for discussions with customers. It should help you solve the problems. This takes us to the last ISO 9001 sub-clause on the list: preventive action.
8.5.3 Preventive action
Have you, in effect, implemented the requirements of your preventive action procedure and asked: “What could go wrong?” “What would cause it to go wrong?” and “What should we do about it?”
Just because your customer’s processes are inadequate or uncontrolled doesn’t mean yours have to be. The focus of ISO 9001 is to achieve customer satisfaction by fulfilling customer requirements in spite of the customer’s shortcomings.
Denise E. Robitaille, principal of Robitaille Associates, is committed to making your quality system meaningful. Through training, Robitaille helps you turn audits, corrective actions, management reviews, and processes of implementing ISO 9001 into value-added features of your company. She’s an RABQSA-certified lead assessor, ASQ-certified quality auditor, ASQ Fellow, and a member of the U.S. TAG to ISO/TC 176, the committee responsible for updating the ISO 9000 family of standards. She’s the author of numerous articles and several books, including The Corrective Action Handbook and The Preventive Action Handbook, and a co-author of The Insider’s Guide to ISO 9001:2008, all published by Paton Professional.
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