8.2.1 Customer Communication
Communication with customers is considered to be one of the most common business activities in an organization. The ways to communicate with your customer may vary according to the type of activity related to the communication, the type of your product or service, or the type of the agreement that an organization has with its customers, and there are cases and scenarios where communication will be dictated and controlled by a third party. All these issues will be structured in planned arrangements for communicating with the customers.
The requirements for communication with customers shall be determined and established: they will be decided, will be formally enacted, and will be clear to the users of the QMS. The ISO 9001:2015 Standard does not specify the need to develop a method or arrangements for communicating with the customer. However, during an audit you will be required to prove that
- The information for communicating with customers is defined as required earlier.
- This information is managed and maintained.
This is why you will need a method to prove these points. The method does not need to be documented but defined; you are not required to maintain procedures or work instructions but to prove that there are processes that maintain communication with the customers.
8.2.2 Determining the Requirements for Products and Services
By determining the requirements for the product and the service, the organization determines exactly what the product specifications are, in order to evaluate later (clause 8.2.3) whether it has the ability to meet these specifications. The determination enables the later verification of its feasibility and ability to supply the product according to the customer’s expectations and specifications. Thus, it is necessary to review all requirements from various inputs and conditions—customer, regulatory, safety, and organizational. The requirements of goods or services are the collection of inputs needed to set criteria for its validation. In order to accurately identify these, the organization needs to develop a method to collect and review these inputs.
The main objective of clause 8.2.2—Determining the requirements for products and services—is to ensure that all the requirements are clear, documented, and distributed to the appropriate parties in the organization or parties that take part in the realization of the product and the provision of the service. The standard introduces us to several main types of requirements that need to be reviewed when accepting or collecting requirements related to the product. Reviewing these will bring you closer to an accurate determination of the requirements. There are no standard requirements for documenting the process. However, during an audit, you will have to prove that all of the product requirements are clear and identified: product catalogs, offers or tenders, order, and so on.
This webpage contains only a fragment of the chapter 8 – Operation from the book: ISO 9001: 2015 – A Complete Guide to Quality Management Systems published by:
Why choose the book ISO 9001: 2015?
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