Customer service and management for product quality

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hello again i thought i would do a quick five or six minute video just to highlight the differences between quality management and services and the the process in products which which we've spent much more time uh talking about and thinking about quality management services many aspects are similar we will still be able to do quality uh statistical process control you can still do all of the things but because most business graduates today is particularly in north america will go on to work in service type industries i just thought it was worth highlighting what some of these differences are so to start with service quality is is more difficult to measure than the quality of goods so a good has is a physical tangible thing and we have much more consistent expectations of what we will get from that thing and so it is much easier to have a consistent experience on the other hand service is sort of intangible we have different expectations we have different preferences and we can be doing or looking for essentially the same thing a haircut or a restaurant experience where the way we interact with that service provider affects our experience of the server even if the food is identical for different people or the haircut is identical for different people our experience of that is is is different and that makes managing quality that much more difficult so i talked about uh the intangible the intangibility of service and those differences between project uh between products and services in terms of how we deliver you know if if we're making cars we make it exactly the same way every time if we're giving haircuts there may be little differences between the way we deliver those or quote-unquote manufacture those and the expectations of customers are different too and and and even if you know if you and i both uh bought this pencil that and and we would experience it relatively quickly you might not like it as much it might not feel as good in your hand you might find that it it scratches a bit or whatever but uh but that is based entirely on uh on the exp the feeling of it will be the same for both of us whereas if we both go for a restaurant experience you might want a much more engaged server than i want and so because because of that difference in expectations that that interaction is much more difficult to manage and and do consistently between uh between customers so in order to do that we we have to recognize that that the tangible component of services in quick is important like what we're getting is is important but the process is also important and and understanding that that going through that process becomes important that it's not just a transaction it is an entire process and that the service is judged against the customers expectations so that you can deliver it exactly the same way every time but if my expectations or my preferences are different that that my evaluation of the quality of that interaction will be different and the last thing is exceptions will will occur so you could have service failures that have absolutely nothing to do with yours with your delivery and so that becomes an important point to to understand as we manage quality in a service process so what determines sort of the quote-unquote quality of a service uh reliability the consistency with which we get that so i'd like to have whatever my expectations of service are i'd like to have a similar experience every time and so again as i as i've talked about before consistency is an important element of quality and that's particularly true in services responsiveness is the willing to the willingness to adapt to different preferences or different expectations or even different expectations from day to day and so that flexibility i think is really unique to to services and is something that differentiates it from from products competence we have to be good at we have to be able to deliver it access we have to they have to be able to act they have to be able to get there not only in terms of access about location but the accessibility or approachability of the people delivering that service courtesy is obvious communication i think is relatively clear we have to keep that sort of two-way that that two-way process going credibility uh you know do they believe that you're going to be able to deliver that that's a perception thing very much security do they feel good about it do they have doubt do they feel risk understanding and knowing the customer this is important it's important in in in goods too but it's much more clearly we're much more clearly able to define what we're delivering and have customers self-select that is a little bit more difficult in service so understanding knowing the customers and tying that back to this this this responsiveness the willingness or readiness of a point of employees to change the way we deliver that or to tell people that we are unable to deliver that and and sometimes it's important to say we can't give you what you want in rather than trying to deliver something that that customer was going to be unhappy with and then there's the tangibles the physical evidence of the service whether it's a haircut or or a cash withdrawal from an atm and all of those things so we have to be able to deliver on it so quality in a service complex context is much more complex and much more difficult to deliver so that said we are going to fail and we're going to we because customers are there when we deliver that we have a much broader opportunity to fail when we are in front of a customer if we are doing a product again back to my pencil here if we are doing a product and it has a manufacturing defect hopefully we catch that before before we deliver it so often service quality failures are external failure costs rather than internal failure costs because we can't you know we have to do a good job training we can do prevention things but when a service fails that is at the top that is in much more likely to happen in an interaction with the customer so that means we have to have a plan so we'll talk about measuring quality later but we have to have a plan and marriott hotel calls theirs learn listen empathize apologize react and notify so it's not just about fixing the problem it is about listening to that customer it is about acknowledging their unhappiness it is about taking some of the blame for what went wrong changing it and then telling the customer how you're going to how you're going to change it so you know with a product if my pencil failed you know i'd still want people to listen i'd still want them to empathize but i just want them to replace it if i get a bad haircut clearly that's that's a much more direct interaction and and is something we have to think about so there in in about 10 minutes is it is a little bit of an overview about how quality management in services differs from from that in in products and it's worth paying attention to