Customer satisfaction and related departments

I have a question regarding Clause 8.2.1 in ISO 9001:2008 which talk about customer satisfaction. Is this clause should be applied to each department within an organization or it would be acceptable if it's applied by the organization itself. for example, I'm working in a department that provide no product/service, where are coordinator, our work mainly to coordinates between external authorities and other departments in organization, We receive data from these departments and deliver it to the external authorities, some times the data come from many departments and we collect it in one booklet and hand it over to these authorities. so in this case, are we "as coordinators" need to apply clause 8.2.1 and ask for customer feedback, I`m confused because the data we deliver is other departments' data, so how can we be judged by there data? Are we able to ask for exclusion from customer feedback, because if you understand our role you'll see that we have to customers, because the customers (external authorities) are basically custo mers for the organization itself, not our department? please help me with this dilemma, our department just received NCR in the last audit made by Quality Assurance department and we feel we doesn't deserve it.
Best regards,

Answer:

Customer satisfaction depends not only from the quality of the product or service but also from other elements that affect the customer's experience. For example, if the customer service is rude to customers, the overall satisfaction of the customer will be low regardless of the high quality of the product.

In your case, if your department is in contact with the customers, than it affects the customer satisfaction. Your department should be judged in line with activities it performs. Your problem is if the report is not delivered on time, but the content of the report shouldn't affect how your department is perceived by the customer.

Another question is who collects information about customer satisfaction. In most cases, it is a sales or marketing department or any department that comes directly in contact with the customer.

For more information, see: Main elements of handling customer satisfaction in ISO 9001 https://advisera.com/9001academy/blog/2014/07/01/main-elements-handling-customer-satisfaction-iso-9001/

Hi strahinja,

Thanks alot for your reply, I appreciate it. Actually we are in direct contact with customers however, 99% of our latency on delivery because we are waiting for the data from other department; so how can we be judged and ask customers for their feedback if we have nothing to do with the latency? As I said we are a coordinators between our internal departments and customers, our main job is to follow up data inqueries from customer to the different departments and make sure they answers these inqueries in before the due date. Any thoughts?

Thank you again

Best regards

Well, in that case you shouldn't be evaluated according to performance of some other department. If there is some way of getting out from this situation is to conduct customer satisfaction survey in a way that provides exact and precise answer on what the client is really complaining and then to conduct a root cause analysis to determine what is causing the problem. This would help your department to demonstrate that it is not its fault