What is Quality Management? Definition, Principles & Best Practices

Let's start by answering this question: How do you build a successful business? Happy customers! And, what contributes the most to creating happy customers? Quality!

The quality of your product, services, or the overall experience you offer is what will turn your customers or users into loyal, raving fans of your brand. 

So why don't we take a look at what quality management is all about? 

Quality Management: Definition 

It is the process of evaluating an organization to identify areas of improvement, implement timely changes, and track the results.

In the business environment, quality management is bringing quality assurance(QA) and continuous process improvement together.

In other words, Quality Management oversees every activity and task within an organization to ensure the products or services offered are of the desired quality and that the means used to deliver them are consistent.

Here's an Example...

To explain this further, imagine that you're running a small ice cream shop.  Business is going well, but you've caught sight of a few things you could improve to help you run the shop smoothly.

For example, you've noticed that a different store offers sample hampers to attract new customers, and the ice cream machine is starting to slow down. You should invest in a new machine that would cut down the serving time and improve consistency.

You address these by switching to a better sample hamper and investing in a new ice cream machine of a higher-quality brand. You'll then track how these changes influence sales, and see if there are any more improvements you can make down the lane.

Continuous customer satisfaction measurement is essential to maintaining standards. By keeping customers in the loop, you can identify pain points and work on them immediately.

Now, how can the ice cream shop go about this? Let me tell you how!

Using SurveySparrow, it can collect feedback from customers and employees, and track growth all in one place!

You can create conversational surveys, reach out to your customers via multiple channels, and analyze the data collected using advanced analytics tools! Yes, you can conduct sentiment analysis and decode customer sentiments with Cognivue, the AI-powered text analytics tool!

Plus, feedback looping allows you to hear directly from your customers! Send a customer an NPS or CSAT survey and build that bond no one can break!

Key Components of Quality Management

Quality management in a business involves a series of interconnected components that work together to make sure that the products or services you're offering meet or, even better, exceed customer satisfaction.

And, the process of implementing the four components of quality management is called Total Quality Management (TQM).

The components are:

Quality Planning

It is the process of defining quality standards for a product or service and deciding how to meet them. 

For example, A restaurant owner sets a goal to reduce customer complaints by 30% within the next quarter. To reach that goal, they would develop specific quality standards for food preparation, service, and cleanliness.

Quality Assurance

This is about implementing processes and procedures to guarantee that your products or services will meet the defined quality standards.

For example, a manufacturing company puts in place a quality control inspection at each stage of the production process, to make sure that products meet specifications.

Quality Control

This component of quality management involves inspecting and testing your products or services to verify whether they meet the set quality requirements.

For example, before releasing a new product or feature, a software company will conduct testing to identify and fix any bugs to ensure quality.

Quality Improvement

This is the continuing effort to seek ways to enhance quality through purposeful change of a process and innovation. For example, a company runs customer satisfaction surveys to collect feedback, identify experience gaps, and drive actions to improve customer experience. 

What is a Quality Management System(QMS)?

Like an accurate recipe ensures a delicious dish, an efficient quality management system ensures a high-quality product or service.

It is a formalized system that helps businesses be confident that their products or services would meet the expectations of their customers. In other words, QMS is a set of interrelated processes and procedures for achieving quality policies and objectives.

Importance of quality management!

Regardless of the size or industry, quality management is vital for the success of your business. It enables you to meet the requirements of customers, leading to increased customer satisfaction, improved efficiency, and enhanced reputation.

Through the documentation and planning for quality management, a QMS provides a structured framework for businesses. It's the practical implementation of quality management principles. 

Here are the top five benefits you will get from a QMS:

Improved Compliance and Organizational Buy-in

Quality management via QMS will help you adhere to industry regulations and standards and reduce the risk of penalties and legal issues.

Bringing about an organizational alignment on quality goals and this shared understanding of the quality management objectives will lead to greater organizational buy-in and support for change.

Enhanced Transparency and Accountability

With an effecient QMS you can trace the products or services your business provides to its origin, helping you to actively identify & resolve any quality issues faster.

It also requires clear documentation of all business processes, policies, procedures, and performance metrics, establishing transparency across the organization.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Setting up a quality management system ensures there will be no compromise on the quality of your products or services. Quality management builds a culture of feedback to proactively identify and address experience gaps.

Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity

Quality management facilitated by a QMS can help you identify and eliminate inefficiencies in processes and provide data-driven insights into performance. It can help you increase productivity, allocate resources better, and reduce costs. 

Risk Management

Other than improving the already established processes, quality management will also help you reduce the likelihood of negative consequences by identifying potential risks in your processes and developing strategies to mitigate them.

A QMS can help organizations avoid costly mistakes and disruptions by proactively addressing potential issues.

What is ISO 9001, and how is it related to quality management?

Based on the plan-do-check-act methodology, ISO 9001 is the international standard for creating a QMS, published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). More than one million organizations from 160+ countries apply this standard to ensure consistent product or service quality.

The framework helps you to review the structure, procedures, and responsibilities required for efficient quality management in an organization.

Most recently updated in 2015, this standard is referred to as ISO 9001:2015.

Getting an ISO 9001:2015 certification means that your business has successfully demonstrated that it:

• Follows all the guidelines that ISO 9001 standard specifies
• Fulfills your own requirements and quality goals
• Meets regulatory and statutory requirements, as well as the customer requirements
• Maintains proper documentation

The Principles of Quality Management

We've now discussed the benefits of quality management and what is ISO 9001. Let's dive into the various principles of quality management based on which many QMS frameworks achieve quality goals.

Customer Focus

The customers can make or break your business. And customer focus is about reviewing every customer touchpoint to ensure that they have a pleasant experience throughout their journey with you.

You must have a deep understanding of your customers' current and future needs to deliver products or services that truly satisfy them.

Set up a customer engagement platform that can help you engage your customers, uncover insights, and ultimately create happy, loyal customers. 

It might mean understanding where they get confused in your software, a website page not loading properly, or not getting timely customer support.

Run customer satisfaction surveys, or NPS surveys, to understand how happy they are with you and what you can do to ensure that your product or services are meeting their expectations.

Leadership

The second principle of quality management, Leadership is about being able to set and track clear goals and objectives for your employees.

By unifying the purpose and direction of your workforce, you will be able to create productive work environments for your employees to pursue quality objectives.

When strategies and processes are aligned across your organization, quality will stop being an add-on and will become the norm for how the organization operates. If you’ve worked with bad managers, you know the damage they can cause.

Make use of manager surveys and reviews to uncover employee insights and combat low morale, poor productivity, and high turnover rates.

Engagement of people

This third principle is about empowering your employees to intentionally create a positive work environment that fosters high performance and job satisfaction.

How? 

Onboard the necessary tools to help your employees perform their best and also recognize their contributions. And offering personalized guidance based on your employees' individual skills will help you to maximize productivity. It would help you improve employee morale and ensure continued high performance.

This also means fostering a co-creation culture that gives your employees a say in their work processes and goals, fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility.

 You can run employee engagement surveys or invest in employee engagement software to track how engaged your employees are.

Process approach

The process approach principle is the fourth principle of quality management. It emphasizes the importance of efficient and effective organizational processes. Formalizing business processes will help organizations achieve improved consistency, quicker activities, reduced costs, waste removal, and continuous improvement.

A well-defined process-driven approach helps companies avoid logistical problems that often arise from confusion or lack of clarity. By setting guidelines and procedures, you can future-proof your organization.

For instance, it can help you mitigate the risk of disruption when and if key team members churn. It would also help you to free up time and attention to focus on more exciting tasks, such as strategic planning and innovation.

Continuous improvement

"If you’re not going forward, you’re going backward!"

Continuous improvement is the fundamental principle of quality management. It can be defined as a systematic and ongoing process of identifying opportunities for improvement and driving actions to ensure that your product or service meets your quality goals.

It's based on the understanding that quality management is not a one-time action but rather a continuous cycle of evaluation, learning, and action.

The key aspects of continuous improvement include regular assessment and monitoring of processes, products, and services to identify areas for improvement, address all potential issues, track employee involvement, and encourage innovation.

Evidence-based decision making

As you know, all decision-making involves a level of uncertainty. A factual approach to decision-making can help a business reduce this uncertainty. When you make decisions based on analyzed and verified data, it will help you significantly improve your understanding of the target marketplace and drive smarter decisions.

Evidence-based decision-making in quality management allows you to rely on objective data to review cause-and-effect relationships between different things and understand potential unintended consequences.

You can try to develop a single source of truth, a centralized location for all data, providing easy access to data for everyone who needs it.  

Documenting processes and procedures helps you take guesswork out of decision-making and asks you to strike a healthy balance between evidence, experience, and intuition. This will also help you to review your past decisions without bias.

Relationship Management

From retailers to suppliers and dealers to any other third party, all relationships that your business must maintain need to be continuously tracked, managed, and meaningfully refined over time.

Different interested parties can adversely affect a company’s performance. Managing your partner relationships is creating mutually beneficial relations with suppliers and retailers. 

It will help you deliver value to customers, establish a high-performing supply chain, and improve your organization's overall performance.

After mapping out all external relationships your organization has, you should define KPIs and goals for each relationship. This will help you prioritize them based on their influence on quality management.

Quality Management: Is It Worth It?

Customer satisfaction is the holy grail of your business's success. And, the key to customer satisfaction? Quality!

Quality management drives customer satisfaction. It will help you build products that your customers love and create engaged employees who love working for you. Adopting a continuous feedback collection can be the first step towards it.

Learn what delights your customers and makes your employees stay with you. Review the experience gaps, uncover hidden patterns, and ask the right questions.

Create your first feedback survey today!