Turning Complaints into Positives with ISO 9001 Quality Management

Can you turn customer complaints into positives for your business with a quality management system like ISO 9001? Consider this… if someone likes a product or service, they’ll usually tell a few people. If they don’t, or they receive poor service they’ll often tell a dozen or more people. Isn’t that the way it goes?

Can complaints be good for business?

It is understandable to view a compliment as a positive thing, and a complaint as a negative. However, if you follow an ISO 9001 quality management system, you might be surprised how beneficial the odd complaint can be. Not only will it help you minimise the volume of complaints your business receives going forward, it will also help you understand how best to improve your business and service.

Do you ask your customers for feedback?

Feedback from customers is extremely valuable. Indeed, it can help drive your business towards new goals in the future. What do your customers want or need? Do they have any complaints? What would they like you to change?

Getting in to the habit of asking your customers for their feedback, be it positive or negative, can be a great way to improve continuously.

Record every aspect of your business

Maintaining a record of every step of your business process helps you identify errors, issues, and other concerns that may arise. Without this record, you will likely continue to repeat the mistakes of the past, you may not even realise there are issues that could trigger customer complaints. A proper quality management system like ISO 9001 allows you to identify possible issues so you can resolve them before they cause dissatisfaction.

Keep an eye on staff training

Every staff member should receive appropriate training to allow them to do their jobs to the best of their ability. However, would your business cope if one person was off sick or on holiday? Keeping a record of training and responsibilities allows you to identify gaps in knowledge that could potentially lead to complaints. These gaps could be plugged by providing further training to specific people. This enables you to prevent problems from occurring in advance.

Create the means for regular evaluations to be completed

Having a process for creating, developing, and sending out products or providing services is one thing. Confirming the process is working correctly is quite another. If you use a quality control system approved under ISO 9001, you will have the correct procedures in place to allow you to run checks and evaluations on a regular basis. These will help prevent any errors or issues that could compromise the quality of your offering.

While you can and should act on all customer complaints and, as importantly learn from them, bringing the above methods into play will help prevent complaints from happening to begin with.

Improving quality and consistency with ISO 9001

Consider how ISO 9001 may benefit your business today, and how you could use it to improve the quality and consistency of your products and services, and provide an even better experience for your customers.

World-class quality management frameworks

Quality Management Systems deliver a comprehensive range of world-class quality management, auditing, training and QMS software solutions to organisations wishing to increase customer satisfaction, achieve greater consistency in the delivery products and services, build profitability and enhance reputations.

If you would like to learn more about our QMS solutions, and how we can help you develop world-class quality management processes please get in touch today.

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