3 Things That Help Keep Your Quality Standards
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Quality standards are often hard to maintain for business owners and CEO’s. And one of the most common ways that business owners can keep tabs on their quality is by following up with customers. But often times business owners overlook this crucial responsibility.
Whether you are a small business owner or contractor for an agency, it is important to maintain quality standards. But what should you do if you are struggling? Here are three things that have helped content writers maintain their standard of quality:
1) Keeping Tabs On Quality by Following Up with Customers
Quality is a paramount concern for any company. It is the responsibility of the company to make sure that they provide their customers with high-quality products and services. It is not just about providing quality products, but also have quality customer service.
This means that a company should always be in touch with its customers, by following up with them after a purchase or after a service has been delivered. This ensures that the customer does not have any questions or doubts about what happened during the transaction, and it also helps to maintain an active conversation between the customer and business. In turn, this can help future sales because people will always go with a company they trust and already know.
2) Define Quality to Help Manage Expectations
Quality is an elusive and subjective term. It means different things to different people. To some, quality means flawless execution of a process with the perfect outcome every single time. For others, quality is getting the job done even if it’s not perfect every time. People often measure quality by how well a company meets their expectations and goals, or how closely it fulfills its promises or holds up to customer service standards.
Quality should be defined as meeting your organizational expectations and delivering a product or service that meets the customer's expectations. Sometimes what comes in between a company and customer is not a quality standard of the actual product or service, but the inability of a company to clearly manage the expectation of the customer.
For instance, if a company builds hard-to-find quality homes, but their communication is terrible and they do not communicate what is going on each step of the way with the buyers, the buyers are going to have a bad experience. They aren't going to know what’s going on or how the timeline may have shifted. They might be expecting to move in in the summer, but setbacks might make it so they can’t move in until the fall.
The Customers have packed boxes and at the last minute are told, “Hey, you can’t move now until the fall.” That would disrupt plans, moving coordination, and the works. The house is a quality-built home. But the communication was so poor that the company didn’t communicate with the buyers issues that needed to be addressed ahead of moving in, which pushed back the home completion date. All this caused the home builder to fail in managing the expectations of the buyers.
What the homebuilder should have done, in this example, was to make sure the customer was updated every step of the way. Instead of not communicating delays, communicate upfront that there may be delays. They could have said something like, “As a home builder we want to do things right, which means there might be delays. If there are delays, we will let you know so you don’t have to be surprised.” This would have helped manage the expectations of the customer and not left them out of what was going on.
3) Quality Isn’t Perfectionism
Perfectionism is the tendency to hold oneself to an impossibly high standard of achievement. It can be debilitating and can cause significant impairment in important life areas. Perfectionists are often very critical of themselves, and they usually have unrealistic expectations for themselves. It can be easy for some to get into this trap.
Perfectionists set impossibly high standards for themselves that are hard or impossible to meet, then feel unhappy about their perceived failure when they do not reach them. It is important to be able to recognize when something is done and stop working on it in order to avoid fixating on things that do not really matter. We should be constantly striving for quality and avoiding perfectionism. It’s good to evaluate your product or service, but don’t obsess over it.
And don’t compare yourself to others. What you offer is special and unique. As the late Mr. Rogers always would remind us - no one else is like you in this world. And your product or service is unique because you stand behind it.
Keeping these things in mind will help keep your customers happy and coming back. Quality of product or service is important, but so is how you manage your own and the customer’s expectations. And what matters most in story-branding is making sure that people are sharing the right stories with others when they talk about your product or service. Remember, story branding isn’t what you say about your organization, it’s what other people tell other people about your organization.
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