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As we move increasingly to a service and information economy
from a manufacturing economy, the opportunities to apply QFD
to service and business processes are expanding. Companies
who understand their customers will be in a strong position
in this new economy.
What should we take into account when applying QFD in a
service setting or transactional processes? These processes
are complex because of inherent human factors such as
expectation and perception based on cultural and personal
experiences, emotional interactions by both the customer and
service provider, and the intangible nature of service
products. This requires changes in our approach.
“We must be aware of these differences,” says
Glenn Mazur,
executive director of the QFD Institute:
- Services deploy to human tasks and information, not
components.
- Services cannot be stored as inventory because they
are delivered at the moment of transaction, most often by
people. Human activities have more variation than
mechanical processes, and are more difficult to control.
- Services can be changed quickly if information from
consumers regarding satisfaction and dissatisfaction is
communicated. The service provider can often be both the
source of the dissatisfaction as well as the channel of
communication, so management must set up systems that
takes this into account.
- Bad experiences with products can be overcome by good
experiences with support services; bad experiences with
support service could render an otherwise good product
unsatisfactory.
- Today, services can be outsourced for 24/7 response
time, including technical support, reservations systems,
medical transcription and test interpretation, data
processing, etc.
QFD can enhance all the above situations, including
selection of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) partners,
both domestic and foreign. The following cases illustrate
recent applications of QFD to service activities:
Global Customer Support
Today’s customers expect seamless support no matter where
they are and when they call. When customer support
operations are set up around the world to be available 24/7,
those operations must have standard operating procedures.
One company used QFD to improve its global support
operations by identifying which procedures were most
critical to customer satisfaction and reflecting the
findings in its support staff training as well as in data
base design.
Value-added Strategy
Using QFD to do a
'gemba'
study and determining critical customer needs, one
technology company was able to enhance its service
offerings, thereby making their hardware product more
attractive in a market that has become crowded with similar
products.
Quality of Work Life
One telecommunications company used QFD to attract and
retain its best employees. While competitive wages and
benefits are critical, they found that other workplace
issues, such as quality of management, can also affect
employee satisfaction. QFD helped identify what mattered
most to workers, and then directed management to change
their approach to these issues.
Expand to New Market Segments
A food service company used QFD to revamp its product
offerings to include an emerging market segment, in this
case women business travelers. As a result, some of their
shops reported that sales doubled within 30 days.
Other service cases include using QFD to identify new
business opportunities in healthcare industry, to identify
and resolve defects in chemical processes, and more.
Numerous applications of QFD to service and business process
situations are possible.
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