Improve Quality to Satisfied Customers - Lean

by Veena Shetty Manager - Marketing

How Can You Improve On Quality To Have Satisfied Customers?

Quality depends highly on focusing on outcomes rather than on outputs. Now, you may ask what the difference between the two is. Take a look.

The four As of Accuracy, Availability, Attitude and Advice is what results in outcomes.

• Accuracy - Making the right analysis of the problem and coming up with a quick fix immediately.

• Availability - Being available for your customers as much as possible rather than putting them on the waiting list, only making them feel worse.

• Attitude - Having the right attitude to build a comfort and trust level in the minds of the customers.

• Advice - Once you prove yourself to be accurate, available and trustworthy, your customers will highly value and readily accept any advice you give them.

How accurate you are, how much available you are for your customers, what kind of attitude you have and whether the customers are able to accept your advice or not - all this decides the outcome of how customers react to your business.

On the other hand, if you are not concerned of the quality of service you are giving to your customers and are just targeting to have your products sold to the fullest, this is where you are focusing only on the output. You wouldn't work on achieving great accuracy and attitude that you provide to the customers, and you will dismiss the interactions with the customers as quick as possible. This will compel on losing your efficiency over time and thus, you lose customers and in turn, business. So, providing high quality means focusing on outcomes. Better the outcomes, more satisfied the customers and more the business.

Let us take an example of automobile manufacturing companies. In general, these companies work on offering style, power and comfort. But, Toyota works on elements like 'peace of mind' and 'energy efficiency' before anything else. The company focuses on manufacturing high quality parts and on-time delivery. If there is any doubt on the quality of any part, the production is stopped immediately to find the fault and resolve it. It believes in delivering small quantities but high quality at regular time intervals, rather than delivering high quantities with compromise on the quality.

Another way you can focus on quality is by producing smaller batches because smaller batches will mean lesser parts in process and more focus on quality. You need to have the right quality so that you have lesser problems and you waste lesser time in solving quality problems. This will let you get closer to target cycles time and in turn closer to delivery at the planned talk time.

To sum it all up, you can say that in order to achieve satisfied customers, you need to provide high quality at low cost in shortest time. For this, you need to work on small batch productions and check for any quality defects and take steps to solve them immediately. This will help in evolving and maintaining standards which deliver high quality products and services. So, quality comes first by precising delivery, and reducing lead time and wasteful costs. This is what is actually lean practicing.

To be able to bring such lean transformation in India, you need to be trained well by lean professionals, and for this you may attend lean workshops going around the country all throughout the year or lean summits, where the best known lean sensei and most enlightened speakers from diverse industry segments come together to teach lean. The latest Lean India Summit is already here on 9th and 10th December 2015. For more updates on such workshops and summits, you can stay connected at http://www.leaninstitute.in/.