Guidance
Plan your management system
The ISO Navigator™ database hyperlinks the ISO 9000:2005 principles and the ISO 9001:2008 requirements; and explains them in plain English with practical guidance.
This guidance has been superseded by ISO 9001:2026 Clause 5.1.2 Customer Focus. If you want to see a comparison matrix that correlates the requirements of ISO 9001:2008 to the revised requirements of ISO 9001:2015, please click here to begin comparing.
Our range of ISO 9001:2026 quality manuals and integrated manual templates cover the requirements of ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001, and offer an easy way to implement and document your organization's quality management system or integrated management system.
ISO 9001:2008: Customer focus (superseded)
Organizations depend on their customers, therefore customer needs and expectations should be researched. ISO 9001 base clause 'customer focus'; links to customer related processes and customer satisfaction. If the organization's mission is to satisfy the customer, then customer requirements must be determined (7.2) and feedback (8.2.1) sought.
ISO 9001:2008 defines customer focus as a top management responsibility which involves determining customer requirements and ensuring that processes exist to meet those requirements.
Enhance customer satisfaction by ensuring that customer requirements are identified. The principal message that top management must convey is that the objective of the business is to satisfy your customers by ensuring a process exists to achieve the following:
- Identifying customer requirements
- Meeting customer requirements
- Enhancing customer satisfaction
When auditing customer focus, the audit team should assess whether customer satisfaction is adequately determined and appropriate corrective action undertaken when things go wrong.
The customer feedback process should be audited as a process in its own right and not just as a clause in the standard. Determine how this process is planned, implemented and improved as these factors will affect the processes’ ability to provide meaningful information about the effectiveness of the quality management system.
Want to know more?
- Read our customer's feedback
- Client list - who's using our templates?
- How the templates are formatted and download examples
- Why we use turtle diagrams and process maps
- What's the difference between a process and a procedure?
- About documented information
SSL certification
A certificate guarantees the information your internet browser is receiving now originates from the expected domain - https://www.iso9001help.co.uk. It guarantees that when you make a purchase, sensitive data is encrypted and sent to the right place, and not to a malicious third-party.
Free PDCA guidance
ISO Navigator™ is our FREE online training tool that shows you how to apply the principles of PDCA to your operations. We also offer many helpful templates that get you on the road to documenting your management system, please visit the download page.