What Happens When Quality is Ignored?

What Happens When Quality is Ignored?

In order to make a customer happy and gain his or her trust, it is imperative that the customer enjoys the entire transaction with the company. It can be the on-time delivery of the product, the genuinely helpful customer service or the kind of ad that brought you here in the first place. But, most often, it is the quality of the product that is appreciated.

These days, people have multiple options to choose from. With more companies coming up with new ideas every day, firms are struggling to find new USPs to stay on top. In these cases, they can come up with new strategies to fight the cut-throat competition in the market or try a blue-ocean strategy where they enter a new market where competition is almost negligible. But in both cases, you simply cannot skimp on the quality. Quality helps the company in ways that helps them to establish a brand. It also helps in maintaining customer loyalty and lower the risks of costs and damages.

Here are 5 reasons why a greater emphasis on quality is justified.

#1. Exceed customer expectations

Customers would want the best for themselves. This can on-time delivery and extremely well-crafted quality of an object. So, taking steps in ensuring that these are met is a given. But you can only hold your customers if you can exceed their expectation.

#2. Establish Your Reputation

With the excellent quality of products comes the crafted praises of customers on social media. In this day and age, most companies have their own social media page and they are maintained highly well. It is because, a customer shares their experience on these platforms and also, many times on the company’s social media pages.

#3. Key to Satisfied Customers

satisfied customer

As mentioned above, competition is stiff. So, with a myriad of choices available at the click of a button, a customer who is upset with the service can go off to any other choices. This breaks the chain of customer loyalty because one satisfied customer might tell a few people about the experience but a dissatisfied customer will tell more people about that. So, with losing profits, you will also lose the value of your brand. Such actions have proved disastrous for many companies in the past.

#4. Challenge Industry Standards

While exceeding customer expectations is always a given complying with the industry norms are also a must. Companies dealing with safety or health has no choice but to meet their given requirements by their accreditation bodies. Accreditation quality control systems are key in maintaining those standards.

#5. Lack of Additional Costs

Ignoring quality standards will cause products to come unprepared for the tasks they are made to serve. Poor quality will increase costs in damages and even at times, could put their customer’s health and safety under threat. Most customers than would demand additional costs for the damages done by the company. So, there, instead of a profit, you will be faced with additional and unintentional losses.

So, now that you are aware of why quality is vital for any brand to attain success in terms of profit and reputation, let us have a look at what happens when that sacred value is grossly ignored.

Here are major some of the major incidents that have taken place because of reluctance towards quality management.

The Maiden Voyage of RMS Titanic

Titanic_in_Southampton

It was the most massive moving man-made machine that was made in Ireland. In 1912, the ocean-liner started its journey from Southampton, England on April 10th, 1912. The destination was the United States where it was carrying immigrants and people from the wealthy Upper English class.

What made the incident so infamous was the revolutionary technology it contained on the ship and yet the massive failure of them to stop the ship from sinking. 1,503 people lost their lives and the financial damage was immense. The disaster was the main strength behind the foundation of the International Ice Patrol.

The remnants of the ship that was discovered later were put to test by researchers were who curious to know the reason of why the collision failed the iron rivets. The findings and testimonies revealed that the collision rammed the hull of at least watertight compartments, leading to the slow descent of the ship to the Icy depths. The company that built the ship, Harland and Wolff, has been accused of using faulty materials in its construction. The findings during the 90s from the ship’s hull found that the iron contained more amounts of sulfur than what was required. This is largely blamed for the brittleness of the iron once it touched the icy-cold Atlantic. Also, the iron rivets used had to be made out of poor wrought iron. Many believe that with a better quality of materials, much of the shock from the iceberg could have been absorbed without much damage.

Challenger Shuttle Disaster

challenger-space-shuttle

On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated 73 seconds after its launch. The incident claimed the lives of 7 astronauts and is still regarded as one of the major catastrophic failures of space technology.

It is widely claimed that NASA had to knowledge on how to launch a space shuttle in severely cold temperatures. The O-rings used in the shuttle were made of poor quality materials and they were never tested in such temperatures before. On the morning of the launch, the rubber O-ring became stiff and failed to seal the joint completely.

With the ascension of the space shuttle before breaking up, one of the booster rockets opened sufficiently wide. It was wide enough to allow a plume of fire to be seen by everyone. The scientists monitoring the shuttle knew that it was not going to be a comfortable ride anymore. At the height of 9 miles, the space shuttle exploded. The explosion caused the crew compartment to ascend to a height over 12 miles before free-falling into the Northern Atlantic. The financial loss was over a billion dollars.

2009-11 Recall Crisis of Toyota

Toyota is the premier company that has launched many quality efficiency methods, that have been later implemented by many western companies. That is what made this incident incredibly shocking.

The inadequate installation of an all-weather mat into a Lexus sedan, caused the accelerator to be stuck multiple times, which lead to unwanted acceleration. The incident was made into a global after the alleged deaths of over 50 Toyota users and over 30 injured people. This lead to a widespread fear of using Toyota cars and the company was vilified by many American media outlets and also the government. This cause the company to recall over a million such vehicles but the damage was already done.

The president of Toyota apologized to the world and even halted the production of a few new models for the time being. The financial costs are estimated to be over $5 billion.

Final Thoughts on the Matter

thought

So, this sums up as to why quality is incredibly vital for any company and also the consequences of ignoring quality. To improve your hand on quality control, you can always implement quality enhancement methods that will help you out in this regard. The most popular and successful of these methodologies is Six Sigma. You can read more about it and the role it plays to enhance the quality of products here.

Also, if you want to gain a certification in Six Sigma, you can choose from one of the many belts. There is the Yellow belt for beginners, Green belt for the intermediate, Black belt for the most advanced.

To gain a certification course in Six Sigma for a beginner, you can try out the Yellow Belt Six Sigma certification. This course comes with over 6 hours of video and covers 30 major sections that will make you familiarize with all the essentials of Six Sigma beginners.

If you have the basic knowledge of six sigma, you go for a more intermediate course like the Green Six Sigma Belt certification. The course comes with one video and covers 8 topics including Kano analysis and its introduction, Kano grid analysis, the 7 steps for a Kano Analysis, advantages and disadvantages of Kano and much more.

And finally, if you want to be an expert at Six Sigma, you should go for the Six Sigma Black Belt: Become a QFD Specialist course. The course comes with 1 hour of video and covers 6 vital sections.

All these courses are taught by instructors from AIGPE (Advanced Innovation Group Pro Excellence) which is regarded as one of the benchmarks for corporation excellence.

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