What customers expect from quality

1. Fit for purpose: the product does the job the customer bought it for, and keeps doing it for as long as they were led to expect.
2. The same every time: consistency is what customers notice, so the tenth purchase has to match the first, and a business that is excellent on Monday and careless on Friday has a quality problem.
3. Expectations in the production of goods: buyers expect the item to work, to be safe, to match its description and to be identical to the last one they bought.
4. Expectations in the provision of services: customers expect the service to be reliable, delivered on time and handled by staff who know what they are doing, and because a service is produced in front of them it cannot be checked and put right before they receive it.

How a business identifies quality problems

1. Customer complaints: complaints made in store, by phone or by email name the fault directly and show how often it is happening.
2. Returns and refunds: goods sent back, refunded or repaired under guarantee prove that a fault got past the business's own checks and reached a customer.
3. Online reviews and ratings: star ratings and written reviews on Google, Trustpilot or a retailer's own site expose problems that most customers never bother to report to the business.
4. Failed inspections: items rejected during checks point to a fault in the materials, the machinery or the method before the goods ever leave the premises.
5. Falling repeat business: when regular customers quietly stop ordering, there is a quality problem nobody has complained about, which is why sales figures matter as well as complaints.

How a business measures quality

1. Wastage and rework rate: the share of output scrapped or made a second time measures how much of production is going wrong.

1. Return rate: returns as a percentage of items sold show whether faults are reaching customers, and tracking the figure product by product shows which line is at fault.
2. Complaint numbers and satisfaction scores: counting complaints each week, or scoring survey answers out of ten, gives a figure for service quality where there is no physical item to inspect.

Consequences for customers and reputation

1. Lost customers: a customer let down once switches to a rival and often never returns, so the loss is every future purchase they would have made, not only the sale that went wrong.
2. Bad word of mouth: unhappy customers post reviews and photographs that reach thousands of people within hours, and a one-star review stays visible to every future shopper for years.
3. Damage to the brand: the damage outlasts the fault itself, so a business can put the problem right in a week and still be losing sales because of it a year later.
4. Lost contracts: a supermarket will drop a supplier whose deliveries keep failing its checks, taking a whole revenue stream with it.

What poor quality costs the business

1. Refunds and replacements: money already taken has to be handed back, or a second item supplied free, so the business pays twice to make one sale and often pays the return postage as well.
2. Wasted materials and rework: a scrapped item destroys the materials, labour and machine time already spent on it, and reworking a fault uses those resources a second time on a unit that should have been finished.
3. Product recalls: an unsafe or mislabelled product forces the business to trace owners and repair, replace or destroy goods it has already sold, which is expensive and very public.
   1. A car maker recalling one model pays to contact every owner, ship in parts and pay dealers to fit them, a bill far larger than the few pence per car a better component would have cost.
4. Staff time: handling complaints, processing returns and hunting for the cause use hours that could have been spent producing and selling.