5 tips to improve product quality in your small business

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By Henry Brown

To satisfy your customers, widen your reach, and build your brand, you’ll need to focus closely on product quality. To improve the quality of your products today, here are five key areas of focus.

Quality management system

A Quality Management System is a system that defines and documents the responsibilities, procedures, and processes that are put in place to achieve quality objectives and policies. A Quality Management System helps to direct and coordinate your business activities, ensuring that you meet regulatory requirements, and increase efficiency and effectiveness, ongoing.

What are the benefits of a QM system?

The standard for specifying quality requirements is the ISO 9001:2015, it’s widely regarded as the most pre-eminent quality management approach. Using a QS system helps to improve the performance of your organization. A few of the key benefits include meeting customer needs, boosting sales, ensuring compliance, reducing waste, and creating expansion opportunities.

-Product testing 

Product testing is the procedure for assessing the performance of your product. Throughout this process, you’ll need to determine the customer’s perception of benefit, value, and quality. Medium discussed the importance of this process, asserting that, ‘product testing will help you to make business decisions based on facts, not assumptions.’

Why perform product testing?

Extensive product testing will allow you to accurately assess the market demand and measure the quality of your products. After all, your products not only have to be desirable to customers but also safe. For example, if a consumer isn’t happy with their product, or is put in a form of danger as a result of lack of testing, you could be liable under a consumer protection lawyer in Denver, or a lawyer wherever you are based. These processes will also allow you to give your sales staff a deeper insight, to inform their marketing strategies. Detailed product testing will also allow you to gauge where you stand against your competitors, and tweak your pricing strategies. You’ll need to conduct Beta testing, to ensure that your product components reflect the quality that you intended.

Collect feedback and enhance

To improve the quality of your product you should collect customer feedback, and then use this feedback to enhance quality. With the right insights from your customers, you’ll be able to create a winning strategy. There are many ways that you can collect customer feedback including emails, pop-up surveys on your site, chatbots, or social media competitions.

Analyze your competitors

With so many similar products on the market, product quality is a defining factor, which sets one brand apart from another. Bearing this in mind, it’s a wise move to analyze the products of your competitors. Look at the materials that they are using, are they higher quality than what you have to offer? Consider their product durability, are they offering a longer-life product? What are their USPs? Assess how yours compare and strive to offer something special.

Promote a quality culture

Ensure that you promote a quality culture within your organization, encourage all of your staff to prioritize quality, and understand what it means for their role. Create policies that establish how you’ll retain quality, and how you’ll assess your progress and performance.

For example, if you’re selling handcrafted products, regularly evaluate the materials and machines you are using to do so. Are you setting a high standard in terms of sustainability? Are you creating handcrafted products that offer something different from the similar brands? Companies who deal in woodwork projects, for example, should look for the best spiral cutterhead planer, to create their products. Definitions of quality will vary, depending on the product in question, and the needs that it fulfils.

With a winning product quality roadmap, you’ll grow your business and improve your ROI.

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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.

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