Vishal Kulkarni is an Organization Turnaround specialist. His forte is in identifying organization’s bottlenecks and designing strategies to overcome those. He is experienced in designing robust business processes for achieving substantial improvements; planning, implementing & monitoring of organizational change management leading to substantial growth. Vishal has trained 10000+ employees in various tools & techniques. This also includes more than 150 CXO’s who are personally coached by him. Vishal carries expertise to bring the cultural change in organization.
Quality is always considered as an important aspect for the growth of any organization. I tend to disagree with it. As per me “Quality Can not make but can break the the Organization”. Let’s understand this in details.
In pre 2000 era, organizations which were manufacturing the products used to classified in to two parts viz. 1. Organizations giving superior quality products at high price 2. Organizations giving inferior quality products at low price. Customer was forced to believe that if they want high quality products, they must pay high price. After 2000 when the globalization policies were fully in action, customers started getting various choices. Customers started getting good quality products at fairly low price. This totally changed the perception of consumers towards their buying preference. Now, consumers are looking for not only good but very good quality products at affordable price.
The above change is forcing the organizations to change their perception towards the quality. In today’s scenario where mere customer satisfaction is not sufficient but organizations should aim for customer delight, quality is the basic requirement. If the organizations are not making good quality products, it’s leading to customer dis-satisfaction. This loss is not just for one transaction, but it influences the entire life span of the customer-product association.
As we all know, a dis-satisfied customer influences many potential customers. Thus customer dis-satisfaction due to inferior quality creates loss of existing as well as potential business and in turn (inferior) quality can break the organization.
The other question remains, can basic quality which can result into customer satisfaction help the organization to grow? My answer to this is NO. In today’s scenario, quality is such a basic requirement that if it is present, organization will be in existence and absence of it can challenge the existence of any organization. Thus, basic quality is a decider factor for the existence of any organization. Organizations will survive if and only if it gives quality products and services required for customer satisfaction.
With this, the question still remains if basic quality can not grow the organizations, what needs to be done? For that, we need to understand the different types of needs to of the customers. The needs of the customer from any product/service can be classified in three parts:
- Stated Needs – These are the needs which customer directly asks/assumes from the products
- Unstated Needs- These are the needs which customer expects implicit with the good or service
- Unexpected Needs- These are the features which customer does not explicitly talks about but if they are given along with stated and unstated needs can delight the customers.
Understanding these definitions, it comes out clearly that:
- If the organization is not fulfilling stated and unstated needs it will result into customer dis-satisfaction and this can challenge the existence of any organization.
- If the organization is just fulfilling the stated needs but ignores the unstated needs, it will again result into customer dis-satisfaction and this can challenge the existence of any organization.
- If the organization is fulfilling the stated and unstated needs of the customers, its giving customer satisfaction and with customer satisfaction one can assume that existence of the organization is protected but growth cannot be assured.
- If the organization is fulfilling the stated, unstated and unexpected needs of the customers, its actually giving customer delight which can help organizations to separate itself from the competition, attract more and more customers and thus can help the organizations to grow.
From all discussion so far, it comes out very evidently that the quality is a very important aspect for the growth of the organization but for that the organizations needs to change their paradigm towards looking at the quality. This required the change in the definition of quality. In today’s scenario, for quality to become one of the growth driver for any organization, the new definition can be “Quality Organizations are those organizations which makes products are services which can fulfill the stated, unstated and unexpected needs of the customers”. The real organizational transformation can happen if and only if the organizations align their quality objectives and quality processes to this new definition. Following approach can help organizations to create this alignment:
- Identify the stated, unstated and unexpected needs of customers from your products and services
- Ensure that these needs are part of your product and service design process
- Communicate these needs to all of your employees
- Revisit your processes and ensure that your all process (manufacturing as well as non-manufacturing) can full fill all the above three needs
- Communicate this to customers and ensure its 100% compliance to get the customer delight.
If the organizations will follow this approach, I am sure that the quality can be one of the powerful driver for the growth of the organizations.