Organizations pursue quality through numerous facets. In fact, there’s quite a few aspects of business that companies can be proud of—reliable products, stellar services, and sustainable practices, just to name a few. However, for many organizations, no matter how much meticulous effort is directed towards a vast array of quality practices, at the end of the day, customer satisfaction matters most.
Organizations can become aware of a customer’s troubles through several means, but customer complaints are probably the most overt. An international standard, ISO 10002:2018 – Quality management – Customer satisfaction – Guidelines for complaints handling in organizations aids organizations in handling complaints. While some may be perceived as nuisances, organizations need to stay enlightened on the complaints of their customers and should be equipped to respond to and resolve their vocalized troubles.
ISO 10002:2018 gives guidelines for the process of complaints handling. Such a process is related to products and services within an organization, and it includes planning, design, development, operation, maintenance, and improvement.
Specifically, complaints handling incorporates enhancing customer satisfaction by creating a customer-focused environment open to feedback, involving of top management, recognizing and addressing the needs and expectations of complaints, fostering of an effective and accessible complaints process, analyzing complaints, auditing the complaints-handling process, and reviewing the process.
Many of these principles might sound familiar to users of other quality management standards, specifically ISO 9001. This is because the complaints-handling process detailed in ISO 10002:2018 is suitable for use as one of the processes of an overall quality management system.
In fact, some of the primary changes made to the latest edition of this standard include alignment with ISO 9000:2015 and ISO 9001:2015. Furthermore, this document, as part of an overall quality management system for customer satisfaction, is now better aligned with the following standards:
You can read more about these in our companion post on Customer Satisfaction Standards. They are also available together as the ISO 10001 / ISO 10002 / ISO 10003 / ISO/TS 10004 Customer Satisfaction Package.
ISO 10002:2018 – Quality management – Customer satisfaction – Guidelines for complaints handling in organizations is available on the ANSI Webstore.
