How to comply with clause 7.2 of ISO 9001 standard ?

How to comply with clause 7.2 of ISO 9001 standard ?

ISO 9001 : 2008 standard is one of the excellent tools to standardize your business processes and achieve a higher level of performance efficiency and effectiveness.

Clause 7.2 – Customer Related Processes defines the flow of exchange of information between the organization and the client. Mainly the sales / marketing or business development department of the organization will take

A general observation amongst all the industry domains is that when it comes to the marketing or sales or business development department for their ISO 9001 compliance, mostly they are not comfortable with the implementation requirements. A deeper analysis revealed that they are not comfortable because they feel that ISO 9001 requirements will be a hindrance to their performance in terms of speed of decision making which is not true if implemented correctly.

From our global experience of working with the biggest to the smallest organizations and their respective sales / marketing / business development departments, we present our easy to understand and implement requirements of clause no 7.2 of ISO 9001 : 2008.

• Establish a process through which you can identify all the requirements of the customers including stated, unstated, post sales, post delivery etc.
  • An easy way to do this is to maintain a log of client query with their requirements or a CRM software.
• Now, before a commitment is made to the client about any of the deliverables, make sure the marketing or sales team interacts with the operations / service / production / purchase / accounts / other stake holders to evaluate feasibility of meeting the requirements of the clients.
  • An easy way to do is send an email to the respective departments to take their confirmation or have a document approved by various departments which says that for a set of requirements of the client, we can deliver within X no of days with Y quality with Z price.
  • In case the client changes the requirements, maintain the records of the same.
• Establish a process to deliver product / service information to the client
• Make a complete flow of the marketing process from enquiry to proposals to negotiations to changes to contracts.
• Take feedbacks from the clients as per identified process. Feedback can be taken verbally, through email, through fax, during meeting, online etc. ( please note that you need to determine the feedback process that is suitable and convenient to your organization)
• Start documenting customer complaints and route it through the operations / quality department to identify root cause of the complaint and document correction, root cause, corrective actions and effectiveness of the corrective actions.

Please note that ISO 9001 is not to complicate the process but is a tool to help you streamline your process so define the process you feel is in the overall interest of the organization while meeting the parameters above and see how quickly and easily you meet the ISO 9001 requirements for your marketing / sales / business development department.