07
1
CUSTOMER
CENTRICITY
Best-in-class quality organizations play proactive roles in their
companies’ multiple interactions with customers. Learning from
customer feedback and from competitor intelligence, they are wellplaced
to help their companies increase revenue and market share
by differentiating themselves through the experiences they offer.
Delighted customers are much more likely to remain loyal; they regularly
spend more on products and services – and recommend them
to others.
For a start, best-in-class quality leaders continuously measure customers’
perceptions of quality. They absolutely understand that
quality is part of the value proposition; they know that customers
make trade-offs between product features, pricing and other components
the quality. So they not only track, analyze and disseminate
multiple streams of customer feedback but they also add data
from alternative sources to provide valuable insight into current
performance issues – root-cause analysis, for example – and to
generate ideas for continuous improvement in areas such as product
design.
CASE STUDY
TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANY:
CREATING A QUALITY PERCEPTION
INDEX
The quality organization of a telecommunications
company has created a “customer
value score” that management uses as an
early warning mechanism. The company
can now continuously explore and resolve
systemic issues at its most valuable customers
and tackle them proactively, and
it can more effectively manage customers’
expectations. The key to that continuous
improvement mechanism: collection of
detailed customer feedback from many
touchpoints at which the company interacts
with its customers.
Best-in-class quality groups also see quality of service as a differentiator
to raise customers’ perceptions of value and to use customer
feedback to increase quality. Essentially, they see quality in terms
of customer experience – not just in terms of the product but in
all of the ways in which the customer interacts with the company,
from customer service to after-sales support. They also know
how to integrate feedback on service quality into product quality.
Increasingly, they leverage the insights from internal and external
customer touchpoints and channel the feedback back into product
development – as far back as research and development – to help
bolster product quality.