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Focus on quality, not just quantity
By Lauren | July 10, 2009
Continuing my Friday series on tips to improve your business and stay out of court, let’s talk about one of my personal pet peeves: focusing on quantity, not quality, of service and products provided. It’s relatively easy to count how many widgits you produced in a week, how many clients you saw in a day, or how many customers you served and shoved out the door in an hour. It can be much more difficult to determine whether you gave your customers excellent service and products that were well worth the money they paid. Consequently, businesses tend to focus on quantitative measures, and presume that quality will take care of itself.
Bad idea, folks.
Remember the old adage, “cost, quality, speed - pick 2?” It presumed that you can get good work fast or cheap, but not both. That’s still true, but a bean-counting mindset may make “fast and cheap” so important that attention to quality goes out the window. And that’s where the trouble sets in. Once your client or customer gets home after a “cheap and fast” experience, she’ll be left with shoddy merchandise, an unpleasant memory of having been rushed through a transaction, or both. If something goes wrong later, your customer will be predisposed to sue first and ask questions later. And, if you’re in enough of a hurry, you’re bound to make mistakes that can cost you big in court.
Cost control and efficiency are important, but don’t let them come at the expense of quality. As one of my own mentors used to say, “nobody cares how fast you get to the wrong answer.”
Topics: Business Ethics, corporate responsibility, customer relations, ethics |