Customer-Driven Quality

Quality is a priority anywhere and everywhere. It is the topic of discussion from the shop floor to the boardroom, in the media and online.

It is often the cornerstone of marketing campaigns, business transformation campaigns and even political campaigns. Philosophies abound on how to live, breathe and practice quality, and the body of knowledge can seem impossible to digest.

Regardless of your quality creed, a common thread seems to weave its way through the fabric of every quality-focused message – the customer. Sam Walton said that the customer is the supreme boss, capable of firing everyone in the company, or consider Juran’s Trilogy concept of quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. You may subscribe to Deming’s 14 Points for Quality Management, his Seven Deadly Diseases of Quality Management, or Drucker’s exhortation that the sole purpose of any business organization is to create, grow and serve customers.

Historically, quality initiatives were centered on reducing variation, primarily in the manufacturing facility and processes.

As people began to understand the total cost of quality, especially the cost of poor quality, it became evident that these costs are influenced by not only internal failure and defects, but also by external failures, appraisal costs and prevention costs.

Forward-thinking, innovative organizations know that the key to being successful at quality and maintaining sustainable revenue growth is to apply quality principles externally. In other words, focus energy on reducing variation for the customer.

This paper describes how your organization can harness the power of SAS® Analytics to demystify hardware reliability, software reliability and other customer quality data in an effort to fully understand factors that influence total customer experience.

The intent of this paper is to capture and articulate this vision for customer quality, total customer experience and revenue modeling as a component of the customer experience. Insights on a phased approach for implementing a customer-driven quality solution are discussed in detail. In addition, this paper provides a vision for the future of analytics in numerous areas of the organization.