We’ll Answer
Why should I care about the quality of my products and services?
How can I make my products and services the highest quality they can be?
How can I maintain and continue to improve the quality of my products and services?
Let’s begin.
Imagine Monica makes handmade mood rings and sells them online.
The gemstones in Monica’s mood rings turn different colors based on the wearer’s mood – blue if the wearer is feeling happy, black if they’re feeling stressed, and purple if they’re feeling romantic.
Monica wants to keep her customers in a good mood, so she aims to provide them with quality rings.
How exactly can she do that?
Let’s decide
YES OR NO
Could this help Monica provide quality rings for her customers?
Durable, long-lasting metal
a. YES
b. NO
Vibrant Gemstones
a. YES
b. NO
Pleasant, protective packaging
a. YES
b. NO
A fair exchange policy.
a. YES
b. NO
Helpful customer service.
a. YES
b. NO
High Delivery fees for customers.
a. YES
b. NO
Optimized process for making rings.
a. YES
b. NO
RESULTS
When we talk about quality products, we don’t just mean the material you put into
the products. Quality also includes providing good customer service, backing up your products with warranties or return policies, and looking at and improving the processes by which you do work, among other things.
Tell me more
No matter what product or service you sell, quality is essential to your business’ success, and it goes beyond the basics of what you sell and do.
Quality can also include how easy it is for customers to interact with your business. Is there a number to call or text to ask questions about your products or services? Once they reach you, is your customer service top notch?
As a business, it’s important to stand by your products and guarantee their quality. For that reason, you might consider offering money back returns or warranties to customers who aren’t satisfied with their product for any reason.
A quality product or service can set you apart from competitors and help your business gain trust and favorability with customers.
Not only can quality be what sets you apart from other businesses offering similar products or services, but providing a customer with something that’s good quality increases the chances of them giving you business in the future.
Say Monica starts making rings with a scratch-resistant metal. It’s more expensive, but investing more money to produce better quality will pay for itself as sales increase.
Quality can lead to more customers recommending your business through word of mouth, as well as leaving positive online reviews, which can be a major factor in the decision making of potential customers further down the line.
To create and maintain quality in your products or services, start by making quality a core goal of your business.
Make sure there are practices in place to help you and your employees work on quality, rather than just speed and efficiency. Everyone involved in your business can help maintain quality together.
If there’s a mistake or mess up, that’s okay – learn from it and make a conscious team effort to find ways your business can deliver better quality in the future.
Quality starts at the very beginning. Before you launch your product or service, make sure that you have tested it early and often.
Certain things you can only learn from testing live. This might mean beta testing your app, hosting a soft opening for your restaurant, or giving a preview of your product to a focus group.
By testing your product or service with your target audience, you can see how they react and avoid wasting your ideas, time, effort, or money on something that nobody wants or that doesn’t work well.
Next, look at the processes by which you make your product or provide your service, and see where quality can be checked at every step.
Say that Monica’s mood ring packaging looks really good some days, and other days looks sloppy. By looking at her packaging process, she can find potential places where issues arise or where quality can be more of a focus.
Maybe Monica wraps her rings carefully on Mondays, but by Friday she’s burned out and so is her packaging. She should think about ways she can avoid burnout to make sure her packaging looks perfect and that she’s not overworked.
LISTEN UP
Remember, the processes you use to create your product or service need to be sustainable. If your quality is based on you or your employees working into the ground, that won’t allow you to provide quality in the long term. You’ll have to figure out a system that lasts.
Another solution that needs to be sustainable in order to maintain quality in the long term is the amount of money your business spends.
You can’t always spend more time or hire more staff. Look at where you might increase materials, time, and labor costs (and by how much), but also examine your processes and see where you can improve quality sustainably.
Say you run an ice cream stand and customers complain that your cones always break. Maybe you need to buy better cones, but maybe your employees are putting the ice cream on the cones wrong and you could train them.
Make it easy for employees to know how to do their jobs. Record and share the various processes that make your business run, whether these are recipes for cakes, schedules for taking out trash, or instructions on how to book a conference room.
Hold meetings to discuss how you can continue providing and improving quality, and ask your staff for input. Given they are a key part of delivering quality, they’ll likely have insights into how you might improve your processes.
To improve quality, invest in hands-on training for new employees to teach them how your business works.
Trainings should be done by you (the business owner) or someone who has done their job in the past. Include details of responsibilities, plus any potential problems they might face and how those have been overcome in the past.
Help employees feel like a valuable part of your team and show how the work they do plays an important factor in the quality of your product or service, and thus the success of the business.
Another essential of delivering quality products or services is receiving customer feedback.
If a customer tells you something wasn’t satisfactory, whether it’s in a text, call, email, or online review, keep track of their problem. Is this a recurring issue? Either way, think about how you can ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Keep track of quality issues even if customers never see them. If Monica makes a ring she can tell is defective, she probably won’t sell it, but she can still note what happened and how she can save money by avoiding such mistakes in the future.
Plan to gather customer feedback on an ongoing basis. Talk to customers informally, listen to what customers say about your business on social media, read your business’ online ratings and reviews, and conduct customer surveys.
Keep these in mind when making customer surveys:
Stay short and focused
10 questions is a good maximum.
Use multiple-choice questions
Let customers rate things from 1 to 10 or select from “yes/no/not applicable” choices.
And open-ended ones, too
Include a question asking, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?”
Ask if you can contact them
If customers let you contact them to discuss results, you can gather details and resolve any issues.
As you turn the feedback you receive into ways to deliver better quality products or services, be sure to also keep an eye on your competitors.
Is the quality of your competitors’ products or services improving or going down? Why do you think that is?
Just as you can learn from your own business’ successes and mistakes, you can see what’s going well or poorly for your competitors and apply what you learn to your own business.
DO THIS NOW
Now that you know that increasing quality isn’t always about spending more money, let’s make a list of what you might do in order to make quality a core part of your business.
Let’s do it
IMPROVING QUALITY
TO-DO’S
What might you put into practice in order to make quality a core part of your business?
Return policies or warranties for products
Hands-on employee training
Guides or instructions for day-to-day processes
Product testing
Regular employee input
Customer survey
