Qualityworld
Future perfect?
Adrian Furnham
Professor of psychology, University College London, organisational behaviour and management consultant
Quality in the production sector has clearly gone up as a function of technology. People have come to expect, and indeed find, that quality in produced goods is extremely high and constantly rising. This will continue. An increase in quality goods also means they become cheaper (despite concerns about toxic toys and so on).
The service sector is different, in the sense that it's not a matter of science, it's merely a matter of selection and training that keeps quality up. I think the issue is how people's expectations have changed, and this is a problem for all people in the service sector. They have to keep up the quality of their service when there is a lot of competition and a great deal of expectation.
To some extent this must reach some sort of limit, because to remain cost effective one can only hire a certain number of people. But in the service sector – in areas such as hotels, restaurants, aeroplanes and transportation – people are concerned enough to put a huge amount of effort into selection and training.They know that quality is the only thing that differentiates. That's why, for example, air miles exist, because you can't tell one aeroplane from another but you can recognise the quality of the service.
Is the service sector doing enough? Inevitably, it's a matter of expense. The trouble with quality service is that you can't take your eye off the ball at all – it's a matter of keeping up the training and the reinforcement. Some organisations are becoming extremely concerned about it, they're worried about the work ethic and reliability of certain young people, and are questioning whether they ought to try and choose a different generation to ensure quality remains high. Most organisations are preoccupied with consistency of quality – the quality of service being as good as your last experience is vital.
The public sector never has to respond in the same way as the private sector, simply because of the lack of competition. You can see that the Post Office, with the threat of competition, has started to do something to improve customer satisfaction. That sort of thing will continue in the future. Ultimately, it's competition which drives quality as much as anything else.
Even without competition the public sector can pursue quality through performance management systems, something it finds deeply unpopular. It talks a great deal about performance improvement, but for most people the delivery is still bad. Of course, no doubt quality of delivery has gone up considerably, it's much better than it was, but then so is everything else, and it's really keeping up with the private sector that constitutes the problem.
In my column in the Daily Telegraph I recently wrote about service recovery, and how organisations deal with you when they make mistakes – issues regarding a lack of quality. This inevitably happens, there's nothing unusual if things go wrong – the question is, what do they do about it, and how they turn this into a learning experience? It goes back to the service profit chain idea, that one can turn a very loyal customer to a very disloyal customer by poor reactions, and vice versa. This is something all organisations will have to address.
Related to this, and a theme that will be the next big thing for quality over the next few years, will be litigation. When things went wrong before, it used to be about complaining, now it's an issue of litigation. People are increasingly going to 'ambulance-chasing' lawyers as opposed to simply complaining. We are developing into a more litigious society and dealing with quality issues not through the usual methods but through lawyers. Interestingly, it means organisations are pursuing quality not for the positive benefits it would bring but from the fear of the negative.
