Why a Strong QMS is Needed in Service-based Firms

A quality management system (QMS) is the most imperative tool today for organizations providing goods or services to ensure greater satisfaction of their customers. However, that is not the only reason to have strong quality assurance services in an organization. There are value-added benefits of QMS. While it primarily helps in manufactures or producers of consumer goods to improve the quality of their deliverables, a QMS has equal impact or importance on the services sectors such as the financial, education, hospitality and healthcare industries. 

 

From improving the efficiency of their processes to managing suppliers, resources, and risks, there are widespread areas that a QMS takes care of in a service firm to help it deliver quality services.

 

Here are the key reasons that make QMS a compulsory management tool for service providers.

 

 

Operational consistency with a streamlined approach is the foundational aspect of a QMS. It helps to enforce standard operating procedures or practices for every operational area of the organization. Adopting them will help staff to minimize inconsistencies or any risks in operations and ensure efficiency. To identify the standard operating procedures that are suitable for your respective operations, you need to get assistance from a professional quality assurance consultant. A consultant can decide the standard procedures that ensure operational consistency by analyzing your organizational objectives, nature of the service, technology or resources used, and operations. 

 

 

The key to faster and more efficient delivery of services to end customers is having well collaborated operations. That can be only assured with perfect cooperation between different teams or employees. Service providers who focus on internal communication to building strong collaboration among employees tend to be more innovative and achieve high customer satisfaction for their prompt delivery of services. A QMS helps in establishing a sound uniform communication network in organization to facilitate the flow of information across all departments and employees. 

 

 

Customers are the life of a business and hence they must be valued much. Every issue, complaint, or query raised by them must be solved as quickly as possible. Organizations with a collaborative culture among its teams are able to deal with customer complaints well. This is because a grievance registered at the customer support center will get transferred quickly to the concerned department which will immediately start resolving it. Moreover, with a QMS, an organization maintains a broad customer relationship management through which they store every vital detail of purchases or transactions with customers. Thus, whenever a complaint arises, they can retrieve all the data about that particular customer and solve his or her problem better. In other words, with the correct evidence and information available, they are able to have better decision making and solutions for customers’ issues.  

 

 

A QMS will help in enhancing relationships of the service-based organizations with their suppliers which provide different support services such as IT infrastructure, communication network and internet connections, printing, broadcasting, electrical power supply, water and food, building maintenance services, etc. When an organization has a QMS to evaluate each supplier and the quality of materials or services provided by them, they become careful and tend to provide better supplies. They do so as they strive to build a consistent and long-term relationship with the service provider.

 

 

Preparing for risk management becomes easy with a QMS. There are several types of risks, internal and external, prevalent in a service sector. Internal risks may be errors in processes, dysfunctional IT systems, failed networks, loss of customer data, privacy risks and so on. External or global risks include changes in market demand for services, pandemics (like the recent COVID-19 outbreak), an economic slump, and so on, which have a direct impact on services providers. A QMS with a risk management framework will help in identifying any risks much earlier with proper internal assessment tools and analysis of market scenarios. Thus, service providers will be able to prepare plans or corrective measures to mitigate any such risks as early as possible. 

 

Implementation of a QMS results in a set of policies or practices that will help organizations in processing their services efficiently, managing resources, and eliminating risks and problems. According to experts, organizations that have embraced a QMS will be able to deliver their services faster and also address each of their customer queries more efficiently, so quality assurance services with a management framework can help them satisfy customers better and get more customers over time.

 

 

Damon Anderson is the owner of a reputed quality assurance services agency that assists businesses and services providers with certification compliance for ISO 9001 as well as other standards.  He is also a dedicated quality assurance consultant and maintains his blog where he discusses quality management standards, their benefits, and challenges for organizations.  

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