Metrics for your product/service quality

We like to measure our weight, I.Q., or quality of a product or a service. No matter how much our teams or we speak about quality, they don’t have a clear or unified definition of quality.

“if you can’t measure, you can’t manage.”

Measuring service/product quality allows you to find areas for improvement, assess the team’s performance, set a transparent future roadmap, and improve your customer satisfaction. Too much tracking also is a waste of time. Either you won’t have the ability to make substantial improvements, or your team won’t know which metric is the most important.

• Although quality is temporary, based on consumer perceptions and is shaped in a certain way, from a production perspective, this means an affirmation to eliminate errors at every stage of the process — product design or process design. It also means working closely with stakeholders to eliminate defects at all value chain stages. Quality should be customer-driven, not technology-driven, production-driven, or competitor-driven. Companies often fail to ask two preliminary questions: -
• First, What is customers’ definition of quality, and why are they asking for product enhancement or better service delivery?
• Second, what kind of service would they need post-sales and post-delivery? What are the associated KPIs against each?

As ordinary as these questions may sound, the answers provide basic information on creating a practical customer-driven quality program. We should not forget that customers are ultimate judges of quality. Some 96.7% of 3,000 customers L.L. Bean recently surveyed said that service quality is the most critical attribute. Similarly, the quality of service delivered to existing customers becomes an essential factor for service delivery customers.

Customers’ priorities and perceptions of quality may also change over time — the definition of quality changes with changes in economics, marketing, politics and operations. Hence Follow-up surveys allow you to question your customers regarding quality. Instead of just a specific case assessment, they offer a holistic service overview, giving an overall opinion of your customer service.

While the quality of work is the essential quantity of work is equally important. Quantity of work delivered is the actual value delivered is the actual positive business impact and parameter to compare costs to benefits. This delivery enables organizations to show quantitative improvement in the product or service delivered. Definition of the quantity of work is again customer-centric. Some projects might have no quantity parameters; others might be focused on quantity. For example, if the project is to design a flyer about services, then the quantity of flyers produced is not one of the most critical parameters. Still, the main factor to be observed will be the quality of the information given, its suitability to the audience and the cost involved v/s benefit achieved.

However, in an educational institute, quantity is a crucial factor. Stakeholders will have set clear goals for the number of people enrolling for the training.

The following questions to question will help you evaluate how your quantity of work delivered helps customers -

• What % of requirements are delivered against the customer wish list?
• What % of requirements are delivered on time?
• What % of your requirements directly drive ROI?
• Were the requirements delivered as per customer priority?

Create work packages and incremental design milestones. The work is divided into measurable tasks, and completing each task is considered an “incremental milestone”. Progress is earned only when each milestone is achieved.

It is essential to give customers nothing short of top-notch services.

Consistently measure your service quality and quantity; you can eliminate problems and live up to your service aspirations.

“Quality begins with you but ends with your customers.”

Conversations should revolve around outcomes and consequences of feedback metrics and how to resolve them. As you start this process, start by understanding the business goals, and then implement the quality and quantity measuring parameters that make sense for the client company in its as-is state.

Most companies, don’t think thought about the definition of quality in detail. So bringing this discussion to the table gives you an extra edge ahead of many competitors and marks the beginning of value delivery to the customer.

So, how do you measure the quality of your product/service or the correct quantity delivered?