In the beginning it was the end of line control and its protagonists, the Quality Inspectors, both feared and hated characters whose index finger marked more the fate of an operator than a defective product. The losses, which used to be huge, generated the popular and still widespread belief that "quality is expensive." It was soon discovered that it was cheaper to carry out the same task in several stages within the production cycle and, finally, although quite late, Total Quality Management became popular as a proposal by which everyone participates in the control of their own work. Until we realized that the only Quality Inspector that really matters is the Customer.
But their verification criteria are usually very different from those applied in the "good times". He doesn't fill out forms with data that we can evaluate and sometimes he doesn't even bother to explain where we went wrong; she just grimaces and leaves. Because, to the despair of many, what we are really managing in this century is not the quality of the processes or the resulting product, but customer satisfaction. The ISO 9001 standard itself, a global paradigm in terms of quality, indicates that its purpose is to serve as a reference for organizations that seek to satisfy customer requirements and continually increase that satisfaction (point 1.1).
For its part, the ISO 9000 standard complicates matters a little more, defining satisfaction as "the customer's perception of the degree to which their requirements have been met." Perception that implies, as is known, the process by which our brain interprets the sensory data registered by the organism, with a special involvement of the limbic system, specialized in the management of emotional meanings. The challenge organizations now face, therefore, is exploring the customer's inner world to understand, first, what exactly their requirements are - determined by their needs and expectations - and then how they feel after their transactional experience..
This dilemma seems to run counter to one of the most elementary rules of management, which advises dealing only with objectively measurable cases and things. It also forces us to review operating rules with which we have constructed huge conceptual buildings that, suddenly, we see collapse. Globalization, competition, market mobility and the increasing information available make customers increasingly aware of their power and effectively exercise it.
The strategic differentials of companies rely less and less on products and more and more on intangible benefits, to the point that the classic border between industrial and service organizations has been totally blurred.
Any company that aspires to excel in its specialty knows that it must be ahead of its competitors in the introduction of accessory services with which the client declares himself genuinely delighted, regardless of the main product he receives.
In the early 1980s, Swede Jan Carlzon told us about his experience at the helm of the Scandinavian airline SAS, which he rescued from bankruptcy through a drastic improvement in the management of interactions with his clients. The title of his book, Moments of Truth, began to identify those moments in which the brand of the organization is built, those in which the client experiences a "first-hand" perception that allows him to evaluate the the company's ability to satisfy it. As Carlzon demonstrated, these instances and the way they are managed are capable of sinking or saving any undertaking.
It is striking, then, that this reality has had so little influence in the development of systematic methods to listen to the client in all the opportunities that our business allows and to extract, from their opinions, a precise x-ray of our company. Perhaps the reason could be found in the volatility of those moments, in the little or no preparation of the contact officers to interact skillfully with the clients or in the distance that these situations present with respect to the decision-making based on facts that advise the good management practices.
These good practices, in my opinion, should include the urgent development of competencies that allow all relevant information to be extracted from the customer's internal world to ensure the fullest possible supply experience. Dr. Paul Ekman, who has dedicated more than half a century of his life to the investigation of human non-verbal communication, has managed to identify more than ten thousand different facial expressions, which provide us with a knowledge of the other that we could not even remotely extract from his words. And recently, in a high-impact television series-Lie to me-its main character, Dr. Cal Lightman, introduces us to this amazing universe in a truly engaging way.
When we add the tone of voice to that visual information, the meanings are enriched ten, fifteen, twenty times more than those provided by pure semantics. This sea of content continually floods us, without the formal education to which we have been subjected allowing us to notice them. John Lennon illustrated it, probably in a much more poetic way, in his composition Beautiful boy: "Life is just what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." (Life is just what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.).
A beautiful way to remind us how far we stay from our nature and how unprepared we are to truly satisfy our customers.
