As previously indicated, customers play a pivotal role in the new Standard. The first section on the scope of the Standard makes it clear that the central purpose of the quality management system is to ensure that the organisation meets the needs of its customers and continually strives to enhance customer satisfaction. Indeed, Section 5 places this responsibility firmly with senior management who must also ensure that adequate and appropriate resources are provided to achieve this objective. . | Customer satisfaction measurement and ISO 9001 2000 The new BS EN ISO 9001 2000 standard has made customers the focal point of a process based quality management system. To quote from the introduction to the Standard This International Standard promotes the adoption of a process approach when developing implementing and improving the effectiveness of a quality management system to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer requirements. The diagram reproduced from the Standard shows customers not management as the starting point of the quality management system. The role of management is to ensure that customer requirements are determined and are met with the aim of enhancing customer satisfaction Management is also responsible for making available adequate resources to enable the organisation to develop and deliver a product the standard uses product to mean product or service which will meet those customer requirements. To judge the organisation s success in achieving this core objective customer satisfaction will have to be measured and the results used as a key ingredient for the continual improvement of the quality management system. This type of Plan-Do-Check-Acf process is a continuous one creating the need to identify customer requirements and measure customer satisfaction on a regular basis. C u s t o m e r R e q u ir S C a t u i ss at c t o i o m n e r e m e n t s Source of diagram BSI Figure 1 Model of a process-based quality management system BSI December 2000 . This series of six articles will firstly clarify the customer satisfaction measurement CSM requirements contained in the new Standard before moving on to explain how to set up a CSM system which will meet the requirements of ISO 9001 2000 as well as providing a very reliable indicator of the extent to which your organisation is meeting its customers needs. The requirements of ISO 9001 2000 There are many references to customers in the new Standard starting right at the beginning where the
