Running a Small Business

Lesson 2: Ensuring Quality

Quality and your customers

Ensuring quality is all about satisfying your customers. You may think you've developed the perfect product or service but, unless the customers of a particular target market agree, you haven't. Success in the market place determines whether you have a good product - ensuring quality will help you determine what that product is and keep producing it.

Put yourself in your typical customer's place. If you have several groups that you sell to, do this for each one separately. If they purchased your product or service, what would they want to see in each of the following three categories.

1. Essential
   These are characteristics your customers will feel they absolutely need. Check it against your own "Essential" list from the last section - if you are customer-oriented, they should match pretty well. Now go through your "Impossible" list to see if your customers would require anything that's there - if yes, you'll have to re-evaluate what you're doing. Perhaps you're targeting the wrong customers or your "impossible" rating has to be looked at again. Then look at your "High Cost" list to review whether your customers need any of these items and add them to the "Essential" and "Low Cost" items on your "Ensure Quality" list. These are the characteristics you will want to ensure.
2. Low Value
   These are characteristics your customers would like to see but are not willing to pay extra for. Go through your list of items for which you want to ensure the level of quality and verify that you're not doing a lot of expensive work which has little value for your customers. Where, before, you were looking at things from your own and your business's point of view, this is the check from the point of view of your customers.
3. High Value
   These are the characteristics which your customers will pay extra for. Check these against your "High Cost" items. Any that match should be offered to your customers, either as options or as part of your basic product at a higher price. While your "High Cost" items could be offered, these "High Value" ones those which you have to offer to satisfy your customers.

Now you know what you can do in terms of quality and you've filtered that through what your customers want. You may very well have several lists for the several groups of customers you serve. In that case you'll have to decide whether to offer one product which includes all the groups' needs or several products with different levels of quality and different pricing. In any case, you can now move on to producing the level of quality that you need.

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