Three Key Options for Better Product Quality

The quality revolution began in many companies with a bang--banners in the cafeteria, slogans on the wall. But turning the revolutionary vision into reality has proved difficult and frustrating.

Again and again, clients working on quality improvement ask: “How can we ensure that our quality improvement efforts are focused on things that are important to our customers?”

The answer begins with strategy.

During the 1950s and ‘60s, business typically addressed the future by developing plans that were focused on internal concerns: budgets, production and sales targets. Today, objectives need to encompass a key principle of quality: customer satisfaction.

The options for improving the satisfaction given by products or services fall into three categories: threshold, performance and excitement attributes.

A threshold attribute is one in which additional improvement relative to the competition’s practices results in little more customer satisfaction and little economic value. If, for instance, a taxi company bases its strategy on picking up passengers on time, arriving more than a few minutes early does little to enhance customer satisfaction.

A delivery company, however, might determine that arriving early would add value by increasing customer satisfaction. The earlier, in fact, the better.

In this instance, early arrival is a performance attribute, an aspect of a service or product that results in greater customer satisfaction and greater value with each incremental improvement in performance.

Excitement attributes are those that consumers don’t expect; they aren’t part of the existing buying criteria in the industry. Within this category, even modest improvements can provide significantly enhanced customer satisfaction, a shift in consumer purchase patterns and considerable economic benefit.

Just a few years ago, many environmentally sound consumer products would have fallen into this category. Consumers rarely walked into stores expecting to base their purchase on environmental characteristics. But when they found them, many tended to be impressed and to change their purchase patterns because of them.

Increasingly, consumers are no longer surprised to find products with environmentally sound characteristics; many look for them and expect to find them. What we have is an excitement attribute shifting to a performance attribute.

The trick in plotting a strategy that recognizes these attributes is to lead the shift from one level to another, as the Japanese have typically done with cars.

A firm that focuses its attention solely on its competition is unlikely to lead that shift because its energies and resources will be spent trying to produce its products or services at a cost comparable to the competition.

If, on the other hand, the firm focuses on the customer, it has the capacity to identify and include new features before the competition.