There may not be a concrete idea of how to do it or even what improving quality means in relation to its service. This article, which is the first in a series on the subject, will discuss the first steps in the journey to achieving superior quality for a technology service organization.

Quality has been a key metric in business operations now for decades. This has ranged from Japanese car manufacturers serving as live test beds to prove ideas on quality to Motorola’s Six Sigma and various ISO specifications today.

Superior quality has been accepted as a must for any company going to market today with a superior product. Speak to any professor in an M.B.A. program and they’ll insist the company’s business plan must explicitly state whether the product will be a high-quality and high-cost product, a low-quality and low-cost product or some combination thereof.

It’s understood that quality is the key characteristic that will dictate the operational function of a company and how it presents and sells its product to the market. If not readily available, product-based companies will develop the necessary metrics to track quality and assure it’s maintained at the target level.

For service organizations, on the other hand, this isn’t quite true. Of course, there are technology service organizations that track quality and treat it with the same level of importance that technology product companies do. They, though, are not the norm. This is a benefit for them.

What is considered to be quality for most service organizations is actually customer service and interacting with the customer to resolve an issue.

How does the company respond when a customer has a problem? Is the customer forced to wait for 10 minutes or are they immediately connected to a help desk technician or engineer? How do the company’s personnel respond when a client has an issue of some sort with service?

Is the general attitude that the client is always right or is there a thinly veiled attitude of “yet another user error”? While all of these are definitely questions that should be asked, are they truly examples of having a focus on quality? Webster’s defines quality as “a degree of excellence”.

I would argue the word “degree” in the definition implies a measurement. As humans, we tend to perceive quality in a relative manner. We measure the quality of one product versus that of another. For a service company, this often is where the journey has its first problem. It’s not unusual for owners to say something along the lines of: “We don’t have a product. We have people. You can’t compare people.”

They also say: “We simply need to make sure our people are technically proficient and we as a company are responsive to user needs.” Right or wrong, that used to be true. It wasn’t long ago that the major factor that determined whether a tech service company could maintain competitiveness and have a moderate growth rate was whether its people were technically proficient.

There was enough demand that as long as a firm had good people things were usually OK. This is no longer so. Customers now see technology service companies as commodities. There are 20 companies competing for the same client two companies were competing for a few years ago.

Therefore, the next step for a service company on the journey to superior quality is to realize it does have a product. When a client decides to retain it to fix a problem, it’s choosing the service the company provides over that of every other company it competes with in the market place.

The company’s product is best defined by including what makes the company’s service unique in comparison to its competitors. At the very least, it’s the people on the front line of the organization (i.e. the technicians, engineers and salespeople). It can also include its processes, a custom knowledge base or a customized Web site for the user submission of trouble tickets.

When a company begins to view the combination of its people and these items as its product, it now has something tangible to work with as it moves to improve quality.

The third step is to determine how to measure quality for the product. It’s a meaningless exercise to attempt to improve something if there is no metric that can be used to measure the aspect of the item to be improved. The metric chosen can be many things (i.e. scores on customer surveys after service calls, the number of referrals per month or the number of testimonials per month).

The key idea is that there is always something of value that can be measured to determine if there has been an improvement to the product. That said, it’s important to remember that the usefulness of the measurement is a function of the quality of the metric chosen to assess the product.

If it’s one that can be heavily affected by factors outside the company’s control (i.e. the number of direct referrals), it will not be as useful as one that is based upon variables controllable by the company (i.e. a survey that has customers rate items such as perceived technical proficiency, the ability to communicate actions to be taken or the overall experience of the customer).

When creating the initial quality measurements, the main goal should be to develop a metric that is a valid measure of quality. While this may or may not provide a relative measure against competitors, why that is a secondary concern will be the lead topic for the next article in the series.

Tom Numbere Jr. works for PCG Technology Services.