At The Good Penguin, customer satisfaction has always been of utmost importance to us – we know that keeping our customers happy results in long term relationships which provide mutual benefits. For our customers, they gain a reliable and trusted software partner that delivers excellent value. And for us it provides repeat business and customer referrals which provides the foundation for our continued growth (it also means we never need to look for new business).
One key factor for satisfying customers is for us to understand their needs, say what we’ll do and do what we said we’ll do – but of course that’s not always as easy as it sounds. As a small growing business in the professional services sector where people are individually providing service, the challenge is “How can we grow our business and still maintain the high quality service our customers expect?”. We believe that the answer to that is to ensure that we have and follow well defined processes that guarantee high and consistent quality, rather than it being dependent on the specific engineers working on a given project. In other words we identify what works and turn it into a process – then as we continue to grow we learn from our mistakes, update our processes and continually improve.
Early on, as we started to document the way we work we quickly realised that our goals were well aligned to those of the international ISO 9001:2015 standard. The ISO 9001:2015 is a globally recognized standard for quality management and represents the way a business goes about consistently meeting customer needs and typically exists as documentation that describes the organisation’s aspirations, policies and processes. Central aspects of the standard involve a process based approach, a Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle (setting objectives, making change, measuring change and reiterating) and risk based thinking. The standard is also heavily focused on key quality principles which include Customer focus, leadership, engagement of people, process approach, improvement, evidence based decision making and relationship management.
Therefore we decided to align our business to the ISO 9001:2015 standard and undergo regular external audits with a national certification body to gain certification. We felt this would put us on a good footing going forward and allow us to demonstrate our commitment to customer satisfaction and quality. We are now pleased to say, that after many months of hard work, we have now been certified as having an ISO9001:2015 quality management system. We have been certified by NQA which is a UKAS accredited certification body that has certified in more than 90 countries since 1988.
Click here to view our ISO 9001:2015 certificate.
Of course the work is never complete and this is a journey that we’ve only really just begun, however we look forward to be benefits that our customers and ourselves will gain.