Rollx Vans, a direct-to-consumer manufacturer of wheelchair-accessible vehicles, has earned International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2008 certification, the company has announced.

The 9001:2008 type of certification is known as Quality Management Certification and focuses on the customer experience, said Mike Harris, president of Rollx Vans.

“We’ve always been a customer-focused company and committed to continual improvement, so this certification with ISO was a very logical step for us in our progression to ensure our customer satisfaction and continuous improvement,” Harris said in an interview with Mobility Management. “ISO is truly the gold standard across multiple industries: the automotive industry, the medical industry, the service industry. Worldwide, they’re the gold standard, and that’s one of the reasons we reached out to ISO. They’re inclusive, unbiased, independent and ultimately customer focused in what they do, so ISO made sense for who we are and what we wanted to do and continue to do with our customers.”

ISO creates voluntary international standards that organizations can then be audited on. American Management Technology conducted the Rollx Vans audit, which Harris described as a comprehensive look at the company’s activities, communications and education processes.

A Nine-Month Process

“From start to finish for us, it was about nine months,” Harris said of the ISO certification process. “And we’d been thinking about it much longer than that. The actual audit certification was a full four days, and that was after we had a preliminary two-day conference with them. It’s a very in-depth process.”

The audit included examining Rollx Vans’ actions in minute detail, as well as talking to Rollx Vans employees to gauge their understanding of and compliance with company procedures.

“They check into everything from the initial contact with a customer, if the customer contacts us, through production design processes, build processes, delivery processes to the customer, after-sales service, employee training and certifications,” Harris said. “Employees were interviewed to ensure they understood our quality policy and their interaction with our customers. Quality-inspection processes regarding design, build, sale, delivery, service, all paperwork processes, build processes, customer follow-up, customer feedback and corrective actions are very big things with ISO. It’s not just the quality of the product or product design, it’s the entire process and the interactions with the customers and the feedback from the customers.”

And now, Rollx gets to look forward to maintaining the certification.

“It’s an ongoing process; we have to achieve this every day,” Harris says. “And we have to go through the audit again in 2015. It goes back through everything you’ve done; everything’s inspected from the previous year. Once the bar’s raised, you have to hold it up.”

But he says the process is worthwhile because of the ultimate benefit to consumers. “ISO is part of every day, and it’s part of every action we take. Hopefully, it creates more options for consumers. The more choices they have, the better it is for them, in any industry. I think the ISO standard is extraordinarily beneficial to the end user.”