How Can You Meet The ISO 9001 Certification Requirements?

If you really are interested in improving the way your organisation operates so that you can achieve the results that you truly desire – whether that equates to reduced costs, a better market share, the improved management of risks or even an increase in customer satisfaction levels – then you really can’t ignore ISO 9001.
Those mysterious letters and numbers refer to a quality management system that is ideal if you require a framework that allows for performance improvement and monitoring relating to all manner of aspects of your business. It is, in fact, the most established quality framework on the planet, with more than a million organisations making use of it… so its reputability as a management system is unparalleled.
The process of achieving ISO 9001 certification for your business consists of several key stages, with an expert undertaking an assessment, while a gap analysis is also normally being carried out on your current processes so that it can be determined what work is required if the ISO 9001 standards are to be met. But of course, you may appreciate some advice on how exactly you can meet those standards.
Keep your customers firmly in mind
Those organisations that are eager to gain ISO 9001 certification are urged to look at all of the ways in which they can meet the requirements of their customers – and of course, how you can best provide your customers with the highest quality product or service will differ depending on the exact nature of your organisation. However, customer communication is certainly one area to which you should pay a great amount of attention.
First of all, you’ll need to ensure that you actually have some kind of customer communication system in place that allows your prospective and current customers to do everything from enquiring about or ordering a product, to making a complaint or leaving other feedback. You want to give people easy access to all of the information that they require, including your contact details, and the best way to ensure this is to simply set up a website. After all, this is a world in which people now often head to Google for their information rather than flick through the phone book, and a website not only fulfils ISO 9001 certification requirements, but is also simply great for encouraging sales.
However, customer satisfaction is always likely to remain low if you do not actually respond to feedback that is given to you by customers. ISO 9001 certification requirements demand that you not only have a good customer communication system, but also make active use of it to ensure that complaints are promptly resolved and your company’s procedures are as good as they can possibly be.
Provide the best quality products
Although there are many things that customers may choose to complain about, the actual products that your company sells will obviously be a common talking point. Again, there are ways in which you can use customer feedback to continually enhance your firm’s product offering.
Do your customers, for example, frequently suggest to you that your products are faulty? If so, then it certainly makes sense to keep a close eye on the source of your materials. By keeping a careful record of where your firm sources its materials and when it makes a switch in supplier, you should be able to quickly spot the cause of the complaints – on the basis, of course, that it is the materials that are at fault rather than the manufacturing process.
But the products themselves are far from the only reason why customers may complain, of course, with delivery being another potential reason for upset – especially if your firm deals with the postage of its own items. So why not consider the implementation of a tracking system that allows customers to monitor the progress of the delivery of their package?
Take those first steps to certification
There are various firms that you can choose from when you are looking to meet the ISO 9001 certification requirements, and you’ll want to choose one that has the best possible reputation for assessment and certification.
The company that you choose should have an assessment team that fully understands your business area, and that can therefore provide you with the most suitable support, even possibly providing you with workshops, seminars or training courses to boost your awareness of the standard.
Once a review and full on-site assessment have been completed, the firm in question should be able to issue you with a certificate of registration that explains your management system’s scope and is valid for a certain number of years.