How To Improve Your Product Quality
KEY POINTS
- Routine Quality Checks: Regularly perform quality-control checks to maintain high standards and catch recurring issues early, ensuring consistent product quality and preventing customer complaints.
- Supplier Review: Regularly review and ensure your suppliers provide top-quality materials. The quality of your final product heavily depends on the strength and reliability of your suppliers.
- Customer and Competitor Feedback: Monitor customer feedback to identify and fix issues. Keep an eye on competitors to learn from their strengths and weaknesses, integrating best practices into your products.
You can’t have a successful business without having a great product. After all, long-term success is built on customers becoming repeat customers, not one-time customers, and if the product isn’t good, then they’re unlikely to be coming back anytime soon.
In cases where the product is supposed to last for a long time (think electronics), then product build is essential for gathering positive reviews, which is a highly valuable marketing tool in today’s world.
There’ll be the occasional time when your product quality fails to meet your standards. But those moments should be rare. By and large, you should be hitting it out of the park every single time. So how can you do this? Let’s take a look at a few tried-and-tested methods for stepping up your product quality.
Perform Quality Checks
You don’t have to wait until your customer complains about a product before you know that something is wrong with it. By performing routine quality-control checks, you can help to test the overall standard of your products and help to identify any recurring issues before they become widespread.
Basically, this approach involves not just assuming that every product will automatically be great. Once you move to scale, you have to check that things are replicating correctly.
Review Your Suppliers
You can’t build a quality quality with subpar parts. Think of it as a world-class recipe, which you couldn’t make correctly if you were using bargain basement ingredients!
To make the best, you need the best. It’s recommended to review your suppliers from time to time, to check that they’re delivering the best products on the market.
If not, you may need to work with a new molding factory or find a new parts supplier. Ultimately, the strength of your suppliers is going to have a huge impact on the final product, so it’s important to take the time to ensure you’re working with the right ones.
How To Improve Product Quality: Monitor Feedback
You’d like it if your customers told you when you were doing something right. Alas, they’re usually more willing to speak up when something isn’t quite right. Yet, while no one wants to receive negative feedback, it can be a useful way to improve your products.
For instance, if a customer tells you that a part has broken, it will be worthwhile checking to see if it was a one-off incident or if there’s something wrong with that part of the product. If multiple customers tell you of an issue, then it’s best to assume that they’re correct, even if your internal investigation found nothing wrong.
Keep an Eye on Rivals
Your product should stand on its own, but it can learn from your competitors. For instance, by monitoring your competitors’ products, you can help to identify problems that they haven’t quite fixed yet, and then build those solutions into your own products.
You may also identify the positive things they’re doing that you are not yet doing, and then incorporate them into your design, which will help keep you in line with modern standards.
