Quality can be measured in lots of different ways, but should always be driven by your customers’ expectations and needs. For example, customers expect spinach to be fresh and clean when the packet is opened — this is a quality expectation.

Your product or service might also need to meet legal requirements, so quality can be driven by the law too. For example:

• houses can’t be leaky
• children’s toys can’t create choking hazards 
• a consultant’s advice might need to be independent.

It’s up to your business to find ways to understand, measure, deliver and communicate quality. The better your business can achieve this the higher the quality and, usually, the more you can charge.

Good quality leads to satisfied customers and repeat business. Word of mouth about good quality can help you build your business. Bad quality can cost you time and effort to put right, and can harm your reputation — it can take many positive experiences to undo the damage of a negative review.

One traditional way to think of quality is simply ‘excellence’ — a product made from the best materials, with excellent workmanship, and with no faults. But real-world quality also depends on:

• meeting your customer’s needs
• providing a good customer experience
• balancing excellence and cost appropriately.

Different products or services can have the best quality for different customers, depending on their priorities. And a company can demonstrate quality by helping a customer understand what they really need, rather than unquestioningly delivering what they initially asked for.

Engage with your customers early in your product/service development to understand what they really need and value. This will help you avoid wasting time and money on something they won’t value. Use the tool below to understand what your customers want from you and how you compare against your competitors.

How you stand out in the marketplace

Neglecting any aspect of quality could lead to faults or weaknesses, and customers might think your offering isn’t worth it. Getting the balance right means choosing the right things to measure and control. Then you can deliver the quality your customers need, and communicate your quality to customers as a selling point.

Once you know what your customers want and how they judge quality, you can find the best way to measure the quality they care about. Use your customers’ needs to define measurable characteristics that lead to customer satisfaction.

You can measure the quality of inputs, processes, outputs, the final product or service, and the perception your customers have. The same three steps are useful everywhere:

• define the important characteristics and how to measure them
• set standards for those characteristics
• control your process to meet the standards.

Focus on those characteristics that relate to customer quality and cover the most important problems. Measurements can be useful both at a detailed level in your processes and at a higher level relating directly to the outcome for your customer.

Set standards that relate to quality thresholds that make a difference. Standards are inefficient if they are higher than necessary without contributing to quality as the customer experiences it.

Testing every product costs much more than testing samples — and if the testing is invasive, it might not be practical. Testing samples can be an effective and efficient way to catch problems.

The inputs, processes and outputs that are most important to your business need to be checked most thoroughly against your quality standards. Classifying your inventory by value can help you see where to focus.

Detect errors at the right time

If you have errors early in a process that aren’t caught until later, you waste the work between where the error happens and where you catch it. Bring testing as close as possible to the step where the error could occur. For example, a graphic design service might check the brief is right and check the concept is right before going further. If they only check the final result with the customer, all the work beyond the concept could be wasted.

Here are some useful times to check quality:

• before an expensive step in the process or a ‘point of no return’ (for example, checking ingredients before combining them and committing time and effort to cooking them)
• immediately after a known ‘fail point’ (for example, if you’ve recently had problems with delivery, you might check that customers are now receiving their orders correctly)
• immediately before passing your product on to your customer.

For example, if you are a cookie maker selling cookies to a retail store, you might notice that the retailer is rejecting some of the cookies you send. You could detect quality problems by studying why some of your cookies are being returned. You start checking every return when you receive it — the retailer’s return form includes the reason for the return. You classify the returns into two categories:

• controllable returns — for example, due to problems with manufacture or packaging
• uncontrollable returns — for example, due to a weather event disrupting shipping.

You work on eliminating the quality issues causing the controllable returns. Checking for known manufacturing problems before packaging, and checking for known packaging problems before shipping, saves cost and improves your quality reputation with your customer.

People are part of your quality plan

Management and leadership matter. Once your business knows what the product or service should look like, everyone needs to understand and follow the measures in place. Consider:

• documenting processes and actions to ensure the knowledge is built up and passed on within the business
• building capability in your business by training and upskilling your employees
• setting up incentives to align employee efforts and signal how important quality is to your business.

Controlling processes outside your business (such as at suppliers) is harder than controlling your own processes, but it can be important too. Think about how to explain the quality you need to your suppliers. Put your requirements into your contracts, identifying key quality metrics that the suppliers need to meet. Set up incentives or penalties to support them. For example, metrics could be:

• supplier to meet their delivery commitments 90% of the time
• no more than one in ten boxes to have defective items or packaging
• quality complaints to be addressed within 3 days.

Even with excellent quality control, problems can happen. If you discover a quality problem, you need to fix it. Sometimes the problem is obvious, but other times you may need to do some troubleshooting. If you have a process map, it can help you visualise the steps in your process and decide what to investigate.

Fixing a problem involves finding the root cause of the problem, solving the problem, and checking the solution worked — is the output of the process OK now?

Document the things that have gone wrong, and how you fixed them. This helps you fix the problem if it happens again. Documentation can also free you from having only one person who knows how to fix a problem — a risk if they are unavailable or leave the company.

You might be able to prevent the problem from reoccurring, for example by changing your process or building some sort of early warning into your process.

If the problem reaches your customer, your customer service will be part of the fix. Good service can keep your customer happy despite the problem. Bad service can make the problem worse.

The following four steps can help you improve quality. They’re a good overall framework for continuous improvement too.

• Plan: Identify a change for improving your product/process quality, and define the important characteristics and how to measure them.
• Do: Make the change (you could trial a major change on a small scale first).
• Study: Examine the results. What did we learn? What went wrong?
• Act: Use the learning from the change to adjust the goal or broaden the learning until you meet the acceptable standard.