In search of excellence: work backwards from the customer

By Selwyn Parker

Quality, says Phil Crosby in his book Quality is Free, is all about "conformance with customer requirements".

By that definition, there's a lot more of it about than, say, 15 years ago.

Attending a New Zealand Quality Foundation conference in Auckland on March 22, I made a note of all the examples of excellence (or quality) I came across in random sectors of commerce.

Auckland's Sheraton Hotel produced a superb five-star meal at a dinner function.
Telecom's international operators handled a string of phone calls with politeness and efficiency.

The Department of Conservation-maintained forest trails at Whakarewarewa Forest in Rotorua were in superb shape.

A mechanic fixes a stubborn electrical problem two days after the three-year warranty expired and the parent company pays for it.

Increasingly more people do what they say they will, which is one aspect of quality.

The dump-truck driver drops in a bin almost to the minute of the agreed time. A magazine shop follows up a request for an obscure publication. Documents arrive by courier, as promised. A builder rings to apologise that he has been held up on his way to fix the deck, but he will turn up within an hour, and he does.

This isn't like the old days. Everywhere you see the higher performance that invariably follows more intense competition.

But how exactly do you get quality?

While everybody recognises quality is important, there's still plenty of argument about how to achieve it.

One thing is certain, as a string of speakers at the conference made very clear.

Quality isn't free, whatever Crosby might say, but comes only after a considerable amount of angst.

It's equally certain that you have to have the big Q in a market where mediocrity is punished, said Bob Field, chief executive of 1993 winner Toyota New Zealand.

That's because this is a market without tariffs, special taxes, price controls, import restrictions, limits to global consumer information, and barriers to global shopping.

For the purposes of the exercise, we'll use the Crosby definition of "conformance with customer requirements." In the quality business, you have to work backwards from the customer.

In many ways, the pursuit of quality is a perverse task that is full of contradictions, as a string of speakers made clear.

As well as precise processes of measurement, you need gut feeling. You need to be tough and good-humoured. You must love your customers, but you'll never please them unless you put your staff first.

And don't get hung up on a lot of theory, said Brent Ritchie, now chief executive of Wellington Combined Taxis but former general manager of 1997 winner Westland Laundry.

"Don't read lots of silly books about excellence," Ritchie warned. "[Instead], you must demand to know that your customers, employers, suppliers and community are happy."

That made a few in the audience sit up. For Ritchie, who takes a humanistic approach, it's all about wanting to go to work. If you and your staff whistle as they walk through the door, you have got quality made.

Ritchie's "don't worry, be happy" approach must have something going for it because he turned Westland Laundry around from a basket case with practically 100 per cent staff turnover into a profitable company with a stable workforce.

And it sounded like a good place to be.

Roger Shipp, general manager Telecom Directories which won the award in 1995, said his company took a much more formal approach, rating performance under no less than 17 key measures. They measured turn-around times in the art studio, punctuality of delivery, customer satisfaction levels, financial returns, and probably times staff go to the toilet.

"Measurements should exist in every key performance area of your company," he said. Telecom Directories must know something too. In the early 90s its mistakes made headlines. Now it's way up there among world directory publishers in the quality stakes.

Quality might not be what you think it is however. As Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman said in their 80s best-seller, In Search of Excellence, you have to know what kind of quality you're looking for.

The issue of what constitutes conformance is the key.

"Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for," said Peter Drucker.

Thus, cruel as it might seem, customers are impressed only by what a product or service does for them.

However a company might see quality, there's not much doubt you must have it.