In the days of ecofriendly business and sustainability, quality of products has become and will become an even bigger theme in business. Creating long lasting quality products is essential to building a brand, as well as keeping your customers satisfied.
By creating high quality products, you can justify higher price. You can build a brand around your product when you have a good reputation. You can offer longer warranties for your products and the products will market themselves with good reviews.
In this post, we are first going through the eight dimensions of quality to understand better what quality means. After that, we will also go through different ways producing quality products can help your business out. Let’s get started.
How to measure and understand quality with eight dimensions of quality
Before we get started with the eight dimensions of quality, I must mention that I didn’t invent this list. It was delineated by David A. Garvin, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
The reason I picked this list for this post is because I think it is a great way to measure quality. You can improve a lot of the elements in your product simultaneously, while improving some parts of it may be at the expense of others. Let’s get started.
1. Performance
Performance refers to a product’s ability to execute the main task or tasks that it is designed for. For mobile phones, that might be everyday usage with basic operations, such as calling, messaging, and using the internet. Also, sound quality, screen image clarity, and battery capacity are parts of the performance.
2. Features
Features are additional parts of the product, that are not necessary to the main function of the product. In mobile phone example, that might be custom covers for your phone. It could also be an ability to perform certain tasks that other mobile phones could not do, that could be facial recognition or fingerprint scanners.
Nowadays, most of the new phones have at least one of those, but they are not necessary for the day-to-day operation of the mobile phone.
3. Reliability
Reliability is another aspect of quality. In mobile phone example could be how long the phone will last in day-to-day life without failure. Can you count on the phone working even after a few years, without the fear of the phone just one day calling the day and shutting down for good?
What about colder days in the winter, does the phone have performance issues during colder seasons and hard times turning it on? That one way to measure the quality of the product.
4. Conformance
Next up is conformance. Does the product meet all the criteria customers have for a certain type of product? In mobile phone example, like mentioned before, fingerprint scanner or facial recognition have become very popular.
That might also be a Bluetooth connection option, does the phone fit all the criteria customers these days are setting for it? Does the battery last enough for the customers to be satisfied?
5. Durability
Durability is one of the things that matters a lot if you want to build a brand around your product. You want to make your product last to build a sustainable brand image for your business.
Examples of durability in our mobile phone example could be battery life. Does the battery still last a whole day or two, after a year or two of daily use? Or how strong is the phone overall? Can it handle a few drops occasionally if it happens to slip out of your hands?
6. Serviceability
Next up: serviceability. Serviceability refers to how easy it is to fix the product if it happens to break. Also, this part should take into consideration, how long it will take to repair product. How easy it is to get your product repaired and contact customer service for maintenance.
In some products, if it has to be repaired regularly, even if it has a warranty, it can greatly affect customer satisfaction. If you were to buy a new phone today, would you want to wait weeks at a time for three times in the next year? At least I wouldn’t.
The repair of products like this should work seamlessly. It should be pretty much immediate. In a modern world, it is very difficult to go without a mobile phone for a week or two, at least for most of the people.
7. Aesthetics
Aesthetics or style refers to the looks and image of the products. One company that has really done this well is Apple. People have differing opinions about their products, but it is no joke, that Apple mobile phones are very stylish.
How appealing is the product to the desired customer base? When considering the aesthetics of your product, take into consideration what is your target audience. People have different opinions, so focus on what is important to your audience.
8. Perceived quality
Perceived quality refers to how people feel about the product. It doesn’t matter if the screen of your mobile device on the product label is the sharpest in the universe. If your customers don’t feel that way, it doesn’t matter.
How people experience using your product has more to do with how high quality they think the product is, than the product label tells them. When creating a product, don’t just create a product that your manufacturing department knows is high quality. Create the quality for your customers.
Perceived quality is how you create a brand and reputation for your business. It doesn’t matter if on paper your product is superior. If your customers are not satisfied, it gets really difficult to build that brand.
You can offer longer warranties for your products
Now when we have gone through the eight dimensions of quality, we can continue to explore different ways creating quality products for your customers will benefit your business.
The first one on the list is that you can offer longer warranties for your products, when they are good quality. You know that they are built to last, and even if you offered a longer warranty time, the return percentage would barely increase.
Giving longer warranties for your product will also build trust among your customers. Imagine two pretty similar products. One has a warranty of one year; the other has three years. Even is the price of the second product is slightly higher, as a customer, at least I would trust more the product that has three years warranty. It gives you an image of a long-lasting product, where the company really believes in their products durability by offering longer warranty.
Your product will be more sustainable
Sustainability and ecofriendly business are a trend nowadays. By creating long lasting products that satisfy your customers needs, you will not only create a good brand but also save the resources of the planet.
When your customers can go longer with your product, without having to buy a new one, that will cause less thrash and emissions to the world. Durability and sustainability are the main keys to this. Creating long lasting products will make your business appeal more ecofriendly as well.
More about how important sustainability is in this post.
Quality products market themselves
When your products are high quality, the best marketing is the reviews of your customers. Assuming you have a great product, people might recommend it on your or your sellers’ websites.
Good, sincere reviews build a lot of trust among customers. Whereas bad reviews are a big turn-off for buyers. In the modern world, where everybody can write a review about their products, it is very hard to get away with poor quality products that don’t fit the needs of customers.
When your product gets good reviews, you don’t necessarily have to spend so much energy on active marketing campaigns anymore. The reviews will speak for themselves. The product will market itself by its awesomeness.
Less returns and complains
When you create quality products, returns for repairs and complains about the product are less common. Therefore, you can focus your businesses resources on more important aspects, such as human recourses, product development, growing your business and such.
Creating real value through high quality products for your customers will leave everybody happy. When your customers are happy, your business will perform better. This will cause your business to make more profit and your customers to get what they paid for.
Quality products build brand
Having a high quality product is very important for building a brand. There are a lot of different ways you can build a brand, but high-quality products that will speak for themselves are a good way to do so.
Not spending high amounts of money and effort into marketing campaigns, attempting to create a brand and reputation for your business are a waste, if your product doesn’t match your promise.
Make sure your product is everything you promise in your campaigns and even more. Provide true value to your customers, build long-term relationships with your customers, and create brand loyalty that way.
5 Ways to increase customer loyalty in this post.
Final words
It goes without saying that creating high quality products is very important for your business. Selling something that you wouldn’t buy yourself is an unstable way of doing business. When you know you would buy the product yourself, you are on the right track. Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself.
It’s much easier to develop a product further when you know what users want. When you have a loyal customer base, you can get very good feedback on what they like and dislike about your product.
More about why customer feedback is important in this post.
Other business-related posts can be found here.
Hopefully this was helpful to you, have a nice day.