Using Quality Management to Build and Maintain an Excellent Customer Experience
- Keziah Hicks
- Jun 17, 2021
- 4 min read
Defining Quality
What is quality? Quality is the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something.
What is Quality management?
Quality management ensures that an organization and its product or service is consistent. With four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement; quality management focuses not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it.
What a customer wants and is willing to pay for, determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Thus, quality can be defined as fitness for intended use or, in other words, how well the product performs its intended function.
Some Principles of Quality are:
Customer focus
Customer satisfaction is the backbone to Quality Management. The primary focus of quality management should be to meet customer requirements and to strive to exceed customer expectations, while providing an exceptional customer experience.
Understanding current and future needs of your customers and utilizing that data to create an exceptional experience at every touchpoint (point of interaction), will create value for the customer. By incorporating quality management into your organization, it can aid in ensuring your customers stay loyal, satisfied and this can ensure you spend less to retain them.
Improvement
The needs and expectations of your customers and employees are constantly changing, and therefore in order to successfully respond to changes to its internal and external pressures, continual process improvement is needed to enable team engagement and lead growth.
Successful organizations have an ongoing focus on improvement. By focusing on maintaining and improving the quality of the product and service your organization offers its customers, you ensure that the customer experience provided, always meets and exceeds the customer’s expectations.
Evidence based decision making
This is a method where decisions are made utilizing a method that emphasizes the use of data and experimental evidence. Facts, evidence and data analysis lead to greater objectivity and confidence in decision making. It is also important to understand cause-and-effect relationships and potential unintended consequences.
While decision making can be a complex process, and it always involves some uncertainty, but you can ensure that your customers receive the highest quality of product and service experience.
Leadership
Leaders at all levels establish unity of purpose and direction and create conditions in which people are engaged in achieving the organization’s quality objectives. Leadership has to take up the necessary changes required for quality improvement and encourage a sense of quality throughout the organization.
Relationship management
Similar to the principles improvement and customer focus, building and maintaining the relationships with your internal and external customers, stakeholders, partners and suppliers is vital to both the growth and success of your organization. These relationships can provide you with the feedback needed to develop and continuously improve your processes, experiences and the quality of the product and service your organization offers.
Engagement of people
Last but not least, in order to provide the highest level of quality to your customers, and to manage your organization more effectively and efficiently, what do you believe to be your greatest asset?
Yes, Your People
As highlighted in my previous blog The Value of a Good Employee Experience, when you create an employee experience by empowering your people, motivating them and provide the necessary tools needed; your employees will be more invested in achieving your organization’s vision, mission and objectives.
Engaged employees will go above and beyond to exceed your customer expectations, service quality levels, and to satisfy your customers. Thereby contributing to the overall success of your organization, and decreasing revenue spent on customer retention and increasing your profits.
What are some consequences of Poor Quality?
Product fails
Does not meet requirements
Goes over competitive pricing
Delivery goes beyond deadline
Loss of business
- Poor designs or defective products or services can result in loss of business
Liability
- Damage or injuries resulting from faulty design
Product loss
- Productivity and quality are closely related
Costs
- Poor quality increases production and marketing costs
How can you Improve Quality?
The most effective approach is to launch DMAIC projects. DMAIC is a problem-solving technique that is an integral part of Lean Six Sigma. The methodology consists of five phases: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
Recognize customers: discover their needs and expectations, this can be done by understanding your customer’s journey, your customer touch points and by also conducting surveys and focus groups with both past and present customers
Set performance standards that meet customer requirements
Control processes and improve their capability
Establish quality management systems, QMS are formalized system that documents processes, procedures, and responsibilities for achieving quality policies and objectives. A QMS helps coordinate and direct an organization’s activities to meet customer and regulatory requirements and improve its effectiveness and efficiency on a continuous basis.
Set quality policy, motivate through leadership and equip people to achieve set goals.
Empower everyone to act for quality improvement
Just like customer experience, quality management needs to be part of your company’s culture, it needs to be continuously evaluated and improved, in order for it to be effective and efficient. It takes a consistent effort at all levels, to ensure that your organization is focused on the quality of your product and service, but also all the tasks and activities needed to achieve it.
This is why providing an exceptional employee experience is crucial to achieving the overall vision and objectives of your organization. It allows for buy-in from all employees, creating an environment where they are empowered and motivated, which results in them going above and beyond to produce a quality product and service consistently. Thus, meeting and even exceeding the expectations of your customers, which will lead to an increase in customer satisfaction, profits and a decrease in the revenue percentage for customer retention. Customer loyalty will increase and they will even market your company for free.
So, what’s stopping you from putting customer experience and quality management at the core of your organization?
We at Kmora Simbeatik can help your organization create a customer experience service strategy, along with designing quality management systems that are best suited for your organization and one that will provide your customers with a consistent experience throughout their journey.
Contact us to book a Discovery Session today. Your first session is free.
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