Lesson 2: Ensuring Quality
How to make sure your customer gets the quality of products and services you intended to deliver and he has paid for.
Introduction
Quality is defined as the degree of excellence. When you're ensuring a particular level of quality, you're ensuring that your product or service has the desired degree of excellence - more importantly, you're ensuring that the customer receives the level of quality he expects and which he paid for. Many businesses use Quality Assurance programs to ensure that they produce the desired quality. These are international standards which, if applied consistently, will ensure that you get the results you want.
Quality as far as your products and services are concerned has two aspects: what you sell has to do what it is supposed to do and it has to keep doing it for a reasonable length of time. The first aspect is achieved by checking out your product or service before it reaches the customer. If it doesn't do what it is supposed to, you can fix it. The second aspect is achieved by staying in contact with customers to check if what you supplied meets their expectations. If it doesn't, you can change how you do things so that it will in the future.
In a customer-oriented small business, quality is defined by the customers. You may have your ideas about what a quality product or service in your field of activity looks like and that's a good starting point. But, in the end, what matters is not what you think but what your customers need, want and are willing to pay for.
There is a process for ensuring quality and it can be applied to just about any activity. It involves recording the key qualities and characteristics that you want to achieve in your activity. You then write down the key factors which will let you achieve these qualities and characteristics. Finally you decide on tests and checks which will satisfy you that the desired qualities and characteristics have been achieved. All through your activity you keep records of what happened and, at the end, if a particular test is not passed, you go back to those records, find out why and correct how you did things. This process, if carried out consistently, will always result in the desired results and will ensure the quality you set out to achieve. International standards of quality assurance set out these kinds of procedures for different business activities but go into detail that is beyond the scope of this course..
There are three reasons why ensuring quality is important for the success of a small business.
- Ensuring quality will ensure that you have satisfied customers. Satisfied customers will stick with you and in turn ensure that you are successful and reach the goals you set out for your business.
- Customers which always get the quality they expect will help you create the image of a business dedicated to quality. That kind of reputation is only available to businesses which consistently deliver the quality that is ordered.
- Using quality assurance procedures ensures that you get the quality you want but also ensures reproducibility. If you do something well, you want to be able to do it again exactly the same way.
