Historical Development of the ISO 10002 Standard

Historical development of the ISO 10002 standard

Looking at the historical development of the ISO 10002 customer satisfaction standard: rapid growth in global competition made it possible to offer customers consistently high-quality, economical, and individually relevant goods and services, which in turn sharpened customer loyalty. At the same time, firms that wanted to keep their customers saw their profit margins tighten. The main lever for increasing profitability is differentiation, but the speed at which technological improvements spread made product-feature differentiation increasingly difficult. One-to-one marketing, and the customer loyalty it generates, became the remaining path to differentiation and profit. Customer Relationship Management emerged as the discipline that gives organisations this advantage.

In terms of marketing strategy, the 1970s and 1980s were the era of mass marketing, the 1990s were the era of target marketing, and the 2000s can be characterised as the era of product and individual service. In the 1970s, the marketing departments of large firms tried to market the product or service itself; by the 1990s, image cost came into play, with markets defined for specific products and even for the different colours of the same product. Today even that segmentation is moving out of use, and customers present themselves to companies as individuals rather than as crowds. Customer Relationship Management is the practical consequence of defining customers as individuals rather than as groups or masses.

From CRM to ISO 10002

ISO 10002 was developed as the international standard that codifies customer complaint-handling inside this wider CRM context. By formalising the design, operation, and continual improvement of a complaint-handling system, the standard turns the individual-customer orientation into a repeatable management practice that any organisation can audit and refine over time.