Customer experience driving quality transformation

Abstract

The common definition of quality is fitness for intended purpose. This can be translated into products or services meeting engineering specifications or service level agreements (SLA); thereby, the focus is on reducing the customer defects. I have come across many scenarios where the specifications or the SLA’s itself was mediocre and it barely met the needs of the customer. Even though there may be robust quality framework, standards, and processes deployed to meet those specifications and SLA’s, maintaining a low cost of poor quality, it might not help to achieve long term customer loyalty and in an era of innovative companies leap frogging ahead of the completion, the boundaries between innovation, quality, and customer satisfaction are no longer distinct. In this chapter, I am sharing my perspective of the new dimensions of quality and why it is important to put customers first in everything we do and drive breakthrough and disruptive innovation as a way of winning hearts and minds of our customers in twenty-first century.