Customer Satisfaction and Feedback

Customer Satisfaction

• External customers are those who receive the final products, typically at the organizational level.
• Internal customers exist at the process and cross-departmental levels within the company.
• To identify customers, consider what parts or products are produced, who uses them, who the company interacts with, and who supplies inputs to the process.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

• Key questions to consider include: Who are the customers? What do they need? What are their measures and expectations? How is the product or service? Does it exceed expectations? How are needs satisfied? What corrective action is needed? Are customers included on teams?

Customer Feedback Methods

• Customer feedback can be gathered through comment cards, formal surveys, focus groups, direct customer contacts, field intelligence, studying complaints, and monitoring the Internet.

Handling Customer Complaints

• Dissatisfied customers rarely complain.
• Customer complaints are an opportunity for quality improvement.
• Procedures for handling complaints include: accepting complaints, providing feedback to all relevant parties, analyzing complaints effectively, eliminating the root cause, and reporting investigation results and solutions to everyone involved.

Basic Elements of Service Quality

• Key elements include: Organization, Customer focus, Communication, Effective Front-Line People, and strong Leadership.

Performance Measurements

• Service measurements include billing errors, sales per square feet, and activity time.
• Production measurements include yield, inventory turns, and on-time delivery.

Cost of Poor Quality

• Prevention costs are related to preventing poor quality from being produced through quality engineering tasks (quality planning), manufacturing engineering tasks (work instructions), design engineering tasks (design reviews), and manufacturing tasks (process control).
• Appraisal costs relate to appraising or evaluating quality.
• Internal failure costs result from defects found before the customer receives the product or service; these include scrap, rework, process failure, downtime, and price reductions.
• External failure costs result from defects found after the customer receives the product or service; these include complaints, returns, warranty claims, liability, and loss of sales.

Optimum Cost of Poor Quality

• Total Quality Costs are the sum of internal and external failure costs plus prevention and appraisal costs.
• Low investment in prevention and appraisal usually leads to poor quality and increased failure costs.
• Investing more money and effort in prevention and appraisal improves quality, which in turn reduces failure costs.
• The total costs of poor quality are minimized when failure costs are non-existent.

Hidden Costs

• Hidden costs includes overtime worked to replace parts, additional shipping costs for replacements, the cost of material for replacement parts, inspection of the new lot, and material review costs.

Preventative Measures

• Training, Process Control (SPC), Quality Engineering, Calibration, Effective reporting of quality costs, and Communication.