Is "Almost" Good Enough?
As humans, we are bound to
make mistakes. Unfortunately, consumer expectations are often times quite low
making it easy for people to accept mistakes as an expected part of doing
business.
What margin of error is
acceptable for your company?
A recent article published
about companies throughout the world that have established quality goals of
99.9% for their products and service shared some incredible examples of the
impact of less than 100% quality.
While at first glance, a
99.9% quality goal seems impressive, here are some of the startling statistics
that help to remind us that we should always aim for 100% when it comes to
delivering an acceptable level of quality for our products and service.
If a 99.9% quality goal was good enough, then:
-
12 newborns will be given
to the wrong parents daily.
-
2.5 million books will be
shipped with the wrong covers.
-
2 planes landing at
Chicago's O'Hare airport will be unsafe every day.
-
315 entries in Webster's
Dictionary will be misspelled.
-
880,000 credit cards in
circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their
magnetic strips.
-
5.5 million cases of soft
drinks produced will be flat.
-
291 pacemaker operations
will be performed incorrectly.
-
3,056 copies of tomorrow's
Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.
Customer loyalty is created
by exceeding, not meeting, customer expectations. Customers want consistent,
outstanding service.
There’s an old saying that
“close enough” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades . . . what are you
doing to ensure that “close enough” or “almost” is not acceptable as a normal
part of doing business?
-
Do you have a means to
measure your margin of error?
-
What’s really happening in
that margin?
-
How is your customer
impacted by the “almost’s” or the “close enough’s?”
What margin is acceptable
for your company?
MEASURE-X
6227 North 15th Street, Phoenix, AZ 85014
888-644-5499
www.measure-x.com
The Customer Service Training Experts!
