Role of Customers in Total Quality Management

Total Quality management refers to a continuous effort of management along with the employees of a particular organization to improve the quality of products and services. Businesses need to emphasize on quality of their products rather than quantity to survive the fierce competition. Remember in today’s scenario, there is no dearth of competitors in the market. Why would a customer return to your organization if you do not deliver what you had promised him initially? You can fool someone once but not twice. Quality is an important parameter for every business and should not be ignored at any cost.

Total Quality management works on a very simple principle:

The responsibility of delivering quality products and services to customers lies on the shoulders of every single individual who is even remotely associated with the organization. It is not only the management but also employees irrespective of their designation, suppliers, clients, customers who need to come up with improvement ideas to make foolproof systems and processes to deliver quality products which meet and exceed the expectations of end- users.

Customers play an important role in total quality management.

Before we proceed further, let me ask you a very simple question.

What is the basic difference between a successful and an unsuccessful business?

A business is successful only when its products and services have enough buyers in the market. Yes there are several other parameters also but customers play a crucial role in deciding the success and failure of an organization. Business marketers need to focus on their end-users and what exactly they expect from their organization. Customer feedbacks should be regularly and carefully monitored before formulating any major business strategy. How can you ignore your customers who pay for your products which eventually bring revenues to your organization and yield higher profits?

Understand the needs and demands of the customers

Total quality management ensures that employees understand their target customers well before making any changes in the processes and systems to deliver superior quality products for better customer satisfaction. Infact, organizations introduce total quality management or any other quality management process to increase their customer base and levels of customer satisfaction. Total Quality management increases an organization’s database of loyal customers who would not go anywhere, no matter what. Believe me, without customers a business can’t even exist.

Quality of a product is not defined only in terms of its durability, packaging, reliability, timely delivery and so on but also a customer’s overall experience with the organization. Remember customer dissatisfaction leads to loss of business.

In service industry, employees need to interact with the customers sensibly and with utmost care and professionalism to expect happy and loyal customers. Design various feedback forms for the customers for them to share what they feel about your products and services. The feedbacks may be in favour of your organization, may not be in favour of your business.

Negative comments or feedbacks of the customers should not be ignored. As a part of total quality management, employees should sit on a common platform, brainstorm ideas and come to concrete solutions which would improve the systems and processes to eventually delivery what the customer expects. No amount of total quality management would help if you ignore your customers.

In case of physical products, customers are satisfied when the products are:

• Durable
• Reliable
• Easy to Use
• Adaptable
• Appropriate

In case of service industry customers are satisfied only when:

• Employees are friendly and polite
• Employees are honest and do not make fake promises
• Employees are easy approachable
• Employees are willing to listen and address customer grievances
• Organizations respond to customer requests on time.

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