Reichheld and Sasser “Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services”

Reichheld and Sasser “Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services”

a. Technical quality and customer quality:

The production of technical quality leads to customer quality in both manufacturing and service industries. The absence of technical quality generally leads to both production defects and customer defections. Technical and customer quality can be measured by what counts the most to the customer, not by the producer or service provider. The perception of quality is held by the user or customer and technical/customer quality can be achieved by managing the customer’s perceptions. Manufacturers and service sector must balance a customer’s expectations with technical quality and costs.

b. Minimizing the human element and maximizing the human element:

Production attempts to achieve zero defects call for minimum human capital by exploiting technology to fill the left by the seemingly weak link in the manufacturing process. But this is the former logic path on manufacturing. Today production understands the gains of managing employees as part of the holistic product, not as a means to an end. Even manufacturing employees serve as “near” front-line customer contact as in the service industry by performing constant process improvement and provide support (directly/indirectly) to sales/marketing. In the service sector minimum human element means to use technology to support not to replace, front-line customer contract. In both production and service industries, the intent is to capitalize on technology to assist the human element and therefore strengthen the front-line of customer interaction and the bottom-line – profits.

c. Production quality and performance quality:

Production quality is equally as important to the manufacturing industry as the service sector. In the manufacturing world Total Quality Management (TQM) has been around for many years in different forms, but TQM has formally existed since the 1980’s. Following TQM was the Kaizen...