Why Should I Give a ***** About Quality?: Understanding and Profiting from the Customer-led Quality Revolution

By Sheila Purdy and Dr. Ian Purdy

In today’s world of social media, instant communication and the desire to share opinions (good and bad), your customers are more powerful than ever and holding on to them is becoming more difficult. A revolution is underway.

If your organisation is ready to take advantage of the opportunities this revolution offers, then this guide is for you. Authors Ian and Sheila Purdy show that everything that you and your staff do can have a positive effect on your customers’ experiences and perceptions of your organisation. They present straightforward ideas for building the voice of your customers into your processes and creating an environment in which quality is everyone’s business.

Presenting a pragmatic approach, this guide will help your organisation refocus its quality system and so profit from this customer-led quality revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: May 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483431437

Book preview

Europe.

Why should I give a

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about quality?

Understanding and profiting from the customer-led quality revolution

Dr. Ian Purdy and Sheila Purdy

Copyright © 2015 Dr. Ian Purdy and Sheila Purdy.

Interior Graphics/Art Credit: Boris Budisa.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3138-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3143-7 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015904555

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 05/05/2015

CONTENTS

Preface

1:   Quality and quality

2:   Understand your customers

3:   Understand what you do

4:   Where your process and your customers meet

5:   Get everyone on board!

6:   What each department can do

7:   Leading the change to customer-led quality

8:   Communicating with everyone

9:   Configuring, adjusting and adapting your processes

10:   When will you know when you have become a quality mature organisation?

The useful stuff at the back of the book

1:   Useful things to do to get started with your people

2:   Useful things to do to keep everyone moving

3:   Useful tools for working with processes

4:   Useful questions for everyone

5:   Useful rewards for everyone

6:   Useful resources

For our parents

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mary and Helen for dealing with all the things that have had to be done to get this book out there. We’d also like to thank all the many family and friends that have encouraged us and given us valuable feedback.

Nigel Storney (Managing Director of Lease Plan, Austria) has more than earned our thanks for taking the time to help us develop our ideas and encourage us. Of course we are also grateful to all those people we have worked with over the years for giving us the raw material we needed for this book.

Boris Budisa is the creative talent behind the illustrations and cover design – You have brought our creation to life.

Thank you everyone!

PREFACE

This is a book about quality. It is not a book about Quality.

At first glance, the difference may only be superficial. What difference does a capital letter make after all? For us, there is a huge difference. A book about Quality gives you all the whys and wherefores of all those ISO numbers – essentially an instruction manual for Quality Managers. On the other hand, this book is a support for all the other managers in any organisation. It is a book about getting everyone in the organisation working within a holistic quality system whether or not their organisation has any ISO registration. It is a book that shows you how to connect the work that you and your staff do with improving your customers’ experience of your organisation and their perception of a quality product.

So what prompted us to write this book? With the surge of internet-based businesses, there is now a customer-led quality revolution underway. Everything from books, clothes, electrical equipment to hotels is rated by those who have bought and / or used the product or service. These ratings then influence future customers to either buy from, or avoid this supplier. They may be based on perceived or actual quality; they may have been posted to be helpful or may even have been put there maliciously. But the decisions we make are increasingly being driven not by what a company says about its products but what its customers say about them. With this backdrop, we were asked to present the Quality section of a general leadership development programme for an international organisation. Traditionally, this has been an information session telling the participants which ISO registrations the organisation has, a description of the processes, what they should measure, a list of the process improvement tools they should use and how to fill in the necessary documentation to show the Quality Department that they have done what they had been told to do. In other words, the authorised version of the who, what, when, where and how of the system and its bureaucracy as managed by the Quality Department.

Instead, we wanted to focus on how to get everyone, in any organisation, engaged with the process of understanding what their customers want and turning that into improved products and services that will make their customers happy. Happy customers will return to organisations that do this time and again to buy what they need and will recommend them to anyone who will listen. We tried to find books, articles, even videos to support our message and despite many hours of searching the internet and contacting people we thought might be able to help, we came up empty-handed. There was nothing that got to the heart of the issue. That was our Aha! moment. We knew that we needed to create something that would be useful, simple and practical to help anyone create a customer focused quality culture within their workplace.

Our intention is to reassure all those people in any organisation that do not work in the Quality Department, that quality is not just a necessary evil that the Quality Department imposes on everyone. It is not important to be some sort of Quality geek in order to get the best out of your quality system. This book is a primer that will explain why a holistic quality culture makes sense for your organisation, whether it is a manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, financial institution, NGO, trade association, service provider, institution – whatever, and how everyone in it has a role to play in providing quality to their customers.

To help guide you through some of the concepts, we’ll introduce you to some characters that work for our fictitious company, Fada Co. We hope that you will identify with some of their struggles, motivations and even reluctance to embrace quality and can reach the same conclusion: focussing on quality is everyone’s business and everyone’s business should focus on quality.

We have also included a whole section of useful stuff:

• There are tools that can be used to create an engagement strategy for staff by showing the link between what they do, the quality of the end product or service that is delivered to their customers and how things can be done better.

• Ideas to use to keep everyone moving in the right direction when the initial excitement has worn off and the energy levels drop.

• We have a whole load of tools to use to map, monitor and improve your processes explained in simple, straightforward terms. These will make it easier to understand what your Quality Manager is saying and what she means.

• To make life easier when you go out and about to see what is actually happening in your own organisations and those of your customers, we have provided some starter questions for you.

• Rewarding people for their efforts and ideas is always a sticky issue, so we have given you some ideas of how to do this at little or no cost.

• Then to top it all off, we have given you a resource list which includes recommendations for further reading, websites etc.

We hope that by the time you have finished this book you will have a better understanding of what the world of quality is all about and some concrete ideas of how you can contribute to making your customers happier, your staff more engaged and your business more successful.

Note: to make it easier to understand the ideas in the book, we have used some standardised terms in their broadest sense:

• Quality (with a capital Q) is used to refer to those internal things related to an organisation’s Quality Management system i.e. specifications, procedures, manuals, Quality Department staff etc.

• quality (with a lower case q) is used when we are talking about the holistic quality culture that is focused on customers.

• organisation, company, business, workplace are used interchangeably and refer to any team, department, business, corporation, association or other structure that has internal or external customers.

• product refers to the output of a process that is then passed on to the customer. When necessary, we have specified if we are referring to a tangible product or a service.

• customers can be internal or external and also includes consumers.

1

Quality and quality

In today’s world, quality is not just about what you put IN to your product or service - it’s what your customers get OUT of it.

Customers have always been important - right? Of course they have! After all, without customers, there is no business. But in this age of instant access to information, 24 hours a day, anywhere in the world, customers are becoming even more powerful. They increasingly hold the future of organisations’ products and services on the end of the fingertip that is hovering over the enter key of their internet device. Their comments about how they feel about the quality of your product or service can be sent in real time to any of the millions of websites that allow them to announce to the whole world exactly what they think of it. Potential customers can then access the collective opinions of all your other customers that decided to do the same, read them and decide if they want to buy this product, and if they do, do they want to buy it from you? The objective truth of these comments is not at issue. Your product may be made to the highest specifications, using well documented processes, in a factory operating at super high efficiency and with a rash of Quality Management certificates, but if your customer doesn’t perceive it as a quality product, then none of the potential customers that read their comments will either.

Whether we are talking about the retail world or the B2B world (Business-to-Business), customer comments and ratings are deciding if your product / service / organisation will still be around, employing people and making a profit in the not-too-distant future. Soon, the feedback from customers is going to be the greater driver of change within organisations, than the need to increase share-holder value / reduce costs / increase volume. If the customer’s experience of your organisation does not live up to their idea of quality, they will take their business to a competitor that does understand what quality means for their customers. And where will you be then? In big trouble, wondering why you hadn’t seen it coming and / or done something about it.

Ok, so you might not be the head honcho of some massive conglomerate with the authority to change the course of the whole organisation. You may be a team leader in a medium sized company, a manager in a small company or self-employed. Whatever your job, whatever type of organisation you work for, you can make a difference. You can influence how customers experience what you do, make them happy, keep them coming back and increase your own job security. But we will come back to how you can do that in the next chapters. The point is customers are more powerful now than they have ever been and that power is only going to grow.

So let’s have a look at the history of the interface between customers and Quality and how it has developed over the years. Just as a reminder: Quality, with a capital Q, is used when we are talking about internal Quality Management. We use quality, with a lower case q, to refer to a holistic quality culture focused on customers.

In the late 13th century, craftsmen started organising themselves into Guilds and introducing the first inspection marks as proof of quality for customers. Perhaps the best known examples are the gold and silversmiths that introduced hallmarks to all their products so that those who bought one of these items could know who created it, where it was assayed and the purity of the metal.

Then in mid- 18th century Britain, production moved from small workshops into factories which meant that products could be inspected on a regular and formal basis. This was the start of the industrial revolution that later swept the world during the 19th century. Quality processes were then included more and more into the business world up to the Second World War. This was when the arms industry was required to produce weapons and ammunition to specifications drawn up by the military (the customer) to ensure that ammunition produced in one factory could be fired from weapons from another. The military were the initiators of the external inspection and the developers of the first sampling techniques. 1947 was also the birth of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in London, with sixty seven technical committees (groups of experts focusing on a specific subject). This organisation, and its national member organisations around the world, has standardised everything from units of length to environmental management and social responsibility. There is even an Irish national standard on the preparation of Irish Coffee! (Irish Standard I.S. 417: Irish Coffee.)

Meanwhile, in 1930s America W Edwards Deming and Joseph M Juran were developing the first Quality and Continuous Improvement tools which made them the Quality gurus of their time. By the 1970s, the Japanese had taken their work to revolutionise car production by moving the Quality focus away from inspection of the product and towards the organisational processes through the people that use them. This was the start of the Total Quality Management (TQM) revolution that has been the core