After identifying your customers' expectations and perceptions and incorporating that information into your service standards, you must assure that your organization adheres to those standards. Along with ongoing Customer Surveys and Mystery Shopping, a well-conceived Internal Quality Control System is essential for measuring compliance with your service standards and improving organizational excellence.
All organizations should have a comprehensive Internal Quality Control System. Good systems can vary greatly from industry to industry and even between companies within a specific industry. Some advantages of a well-orchestrated Internal Quality Control System are:
- Whereas customer surveys must focus on a few questions, Internal Quality Control personnel can evaluate a wide variety of performance criteria in great detail.
- Internal Quality Control Systems are considerably less expensive than Mystery Shopping.
- Involving employees in the Quality Control process tends to increase their awareness of these important issues.
As with any tool, an Internal Quality Control System is only as good as its design and the personnel that implement it. Some potential problems possible in Internal Quality Control Systems are:
- Personal bias can influence evaluation and reporting.
- Familiarity with your product or service can cause personnel to overlook the obvious.
These problems can be minimized or eliminated with some redundancy in your Performance Management activities. This is why top companies utilize several tools simultaneously to evaluate their performance. We offer a full spectrum of Performance Management Solutions that can be used together to provide the checks and balances necessary to insure accurate and relevant information.
The William Kerr Agency can help design an Internal Quality Control System that, along with our other tools, will directly impact your bottom line by providing the information necessary to adapt your offerings to your customers' expectations and perceptions of quality and value.
