Overview

Guidance on planning, designing, implementing and improving customer satisfaction codes of conduct — the promises an organization makes to its customers about how it will behave — as the first line of defence against complaints and disputes.

ISO 10001:2018, Quality management — Customer satisfaction — Guidelines for codes of conduct for organizations, is the first of the four-part customer satisfaction series. It is the second edition and replaces ISO 10001:2007. A customer satisfaction code of conduct, in the standard's sense, consists of the promises an organization makes to its customers about its own behaviour, together with the related provisions that make those promises workable.

The subject matter of such codes is practical: how and when products and services will be delivered, how returns and refunds are handled, how customer information will be treated, what advertising claims mean, and what stipulations attach to a product or service. The standard's argument is preventive — clear, honest and deliverable promises reduce the misunderstandings that generate complaints and disputes in the first place.

The guidance runs through the full life cycle of a code: determining the context and interested parties, planning the code, designing and developing its content, implementing it (including communication, training and the resources needed), maintaining it, and reviewing and improving it. It also covers how top management commitment and clear responsibilities affect whether a code is honoured in practice.

Deliberately, the standard does not prescribe what a code should say. It sets out how to develop and run one, leaving the substantive content to the organization and its market. It also does not cover other kinds of code — codes governing relations between an organization and its personnel, or between an organization and its suppliers, are outside its scope.

ISO 10001 is applicable to any organization regardless of type, size or what it provides, including organizations that design codes of conduct to be used by others — for example trade associations and sector bodies that publish model codes for their members.

The four documents in the customer satisfaction series — ISO 10001 (codes of conduct), ISO 10002 (complaints handling), ISO 10003 (external dispute resolution) and ISO 10004 (monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction) — are designed to be used together as an integrated framework, and each can also be used on its own. All four are guidance documents from ISO/TC 176/SC 3 and none contains requirements that can be certified against.

Purpose

To give guidance on planning, designing, developing, implementing, maintaining and improving customer satisfaction codes of conduct, so that promises made to customers are clear, deliverable and consistently kept, reducing the likelihood of misunderstandings and complaints.

Key Benefits

• Reduces the misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations that generate complaints
• Makes customer-facing promises explicit, deliverable and consistently applied
• Supports fair trade practices and customer confidence in the organization
• Clarifies internally who is accountable for keeping each promise
• Provides a framework trade associations can use to develop model codes for members
• Works as the preventive front end to complaints handling under ISO 10002
• Applicable to organizations of any size and sector, including public bodies
• Can reduce pressure for new external regulation of an organization's conduct towards customers

Key Requirements

• Guidance only — ISO 10001 contains recommendations, not auditable requirements
• Determine the context of the organization and the customers and other interested parties affected
• Obtain top management commitment and assign responsibility and authority for the code
• Plan the code: objectives, scope, resources and how it links to other customer satisfaction processes
• Design and develop the content of the code, ensuring promises are clear and capable of being met
• Communicate the code to customers and to the personnel who have to deliver it
• Provide the training, resources and internal processes needed to honour the promises
• Collect and analyse data on how the code performs in practice
• Review and improve the code, and align it with complaints handling and dispute resolution processes

Who Needs This Standard?

Organizations that make explicit public promises to customers — retailers, e-commerce operators, financial services, telecoms, utilities, hospitality, healthcare providers and membership bodies — along with the marketing, customer service and quality functions that write and deliver those promises. Trade associations and consumer bodies that publish model codes for members are an explicit audience.

Related Standards