How to start a Quality Revolution.
"Quality is like having an ice cream on a summer's day: you must lick it constantly. Otherwise, you have a mess on your hands."
That line came from a former colleague. I have never found a better way to describe the problem, so I will not try to improve on it.
Most people assume quality is a given. It is not. The evidence is all around us, every day. The product that arrives dead on arrival or fails within a month. The order that does not show up when promised. The invoice is wrong. The returns process that requires three phone calls and a letter. The app for a product that costs several thousand euros but feels like it was built by an intern on a Friday afternoon. The service centre that seems specifically designed to make customers give up. None of these are exotic failures. They are routine experiences that quietly erode customer loyalty and revenue in ways that most management boards never fully account for.
Quality is not confined to the product itself. It is everything that touches the customer experience - the packaging, the digital interface, the sales conversation, the service recovery, the invoice. Excellent quality keeps customers coming back and generates the kind of word-of-mouth growth that no advertising budget can replicate. Poor quality does the reverse, at compound interest.
The scope of the problem is wider than most companies admit
Consider websites. Most corporate sites are well-designed for pushing content outward - from marketing, sustainability, finance, and legal to the public. Very few are designed around what customers actually need: finding something, buying something, understanding something, or getting something fixed. Finding a price, a spare part, or a returns policy on most corporate sites remains an exercise in patience that most customers eventually abandon.
Service centres are no better. The combination of the words "excellence" and "service centre" in the same sentence requires qualifiers like "not" or "far from" to be accurate. This is not a new observation. It remains as true today as it was ten years ago, and it continues to cost companies customer relationships that finance never traces back to the root cause.
Product quality has improved significantly since ISO 9001 became standard practice three decades ago. The current gap opens at the integration of software into physical products. Mechanical engineering is generally reliable. The apps, the connectivity, the digital layer - for heating systems, cars, home appliances, financial services - are frequently not. If a product has a digital interface, that interface is part of the product. It should meet the same quality standard as the hardware.
Where are you on the quality spectrum?
Seven questions to assess the current state honestly:
Is non-conformance reporting linked to distinctive follow-up actions, tracked via metrics, and reviewed at the management board level?
Is there a common continuous improvement methodology - Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, or equivalent - embedded in the HR competency and promotion framework?
Is there an employee suggestion process focused on customer-facing quality, with the best suggestions celebrated visibly across the company?
Do you trust your quality reporting - or is it like a melon? Green on the outside, red on the inside?
Has the quality policy been updated recently, particularly to reflect changes in digitalisation and relevant legislation?
Does the quality or continuous improvement leader report directly to the Managing Director or COO?
Do you measure what proportion of the issues customers ask you to fix actually get fixed?
A clear yes to most of those means quality and continuous improvement are reasonably embedded. If most are no or uncertain, the opportunity is significant - and unlike most management interventions, a genuine quality culture improvement touches revenue, cost, and customer satisfaction simultaneously.
The size of the prize
Quality is like sound health. When you have it, you do not think about it much. When you lack it, you are reminded of the problem from morning to evening. Calculating the exact financial benefit depends heavily on the current state, but the direction is always the same: companies that take quality and continuous improvement seriously grow revenue, reduce costs, and improve customer retention. The three compounds together.
What is worth stating clearly is that the cost of poor quality is almost always substantially underestimated. It shows up in warranty claims, rework, customer churn, damaged reputation, and the management time spent firefighting rather than building. Most of these costs are dispersed across functions and never aggregated into a single number that the board sees. Aggregating them - even roughly - is usually the most persuasive first step in making the case for investment.
Setting up the quality revolution
The timeline is 18 to 24 months. Longer programmes lose momentum and outlive the sponsorship commitment essential to their sustainability. The board sponsor must be the CEO or Managing Director - not because quality is their day job, but because without their visible ownership, the organisation will treat it as a quality department initiative and file it accordingly.
The operational lead is the COO, Head of Operations, or CFO. Never just the Head of Quality alone. This is a business transformation, not a certification exercise.
Start by getting out of the building. Visit plants, visit customers, visit suppliers. Let them tell you what the problems are without filtering or defending. If the organisation does not know how to receive unvarnished feedback from customers and suppliers, that itself is a diagnostic finding worth noting.
From that feedback, build the blueprint for the quality-and-excellence model you want. Set the ambition high. Starting a quality revolution with the goal of being second is not a revolution.
The project mechanics are straightforward: a skilled project leader with Lean, Six Sigma, or equivalent methodology background; a weekly cross-functional task force with clear objectives; monthly board-level reporting with clean output metrics - employees trained in the new methodology, customers assessed, improvement projects started and tracked to completion, product and service changes initiated, customer retention and Net Promoter Score trends. Keep the NPS baseline consistent - no adjusting the methodology when the numbers are uncomfortable.
Sustain success by embedding quality KPIs into the standard management reporting cycle: customer satisfaction, non-conformance rates, improvement projects in progress, people involved, and the link to revenue and cost. Make it visible, make it regular, and celebrate every improvement that gets implemented. Every idea that surfaces a gap is good. Every gap that gets closed is worth celebrating.
On digitalisation: the opportunity is high. A genuine continuous improvement culture generates hundreds or thousands of improvement projects simultaneously - customer suggestions, employee ideas, process fixes, product changes. These need to be tracked in a pipeline management system, ideally integrated into the existing ERP or data lake rather than sitting in a separate quality database that nobody looks at.
Watch out for
The single most effective way to kill a quality culture initiative is to respond to every gap that is found with the question: " Why was this not fixed before? It creates defensiveness, discourages transparency, and ensures that the next gap is buried rather than surfaced. Every gap that is found is good. Every gap that is closed is great. The only direction of travel is forward.
A personal note
I had the opportunity to lead the transformation of the quality and excellence culture at one of the world's largest power and automation companies in my role as Head of Operations and Quality. The company had 140,000 people, 250 manufacturing plants, a similar number of construction sites, and 1.5 million SKUs. I worked alongside many exceptional colleagues, and we had the support of a board that was genuinely willing to acknowledge the starting point honestly and commit to the change.
If it can be done at that scale, it can be done anywhere.
Let the revolution start.
Stay safe. Be bold.
Daniel
The views expressed in this post are my personal professional opinions, based on research and publicly available information. They reflect analysis of industry trends and practices, not assertions of fact about specific companies or individuals. Nothing in this post constitutes legal, financial, or investment advice.
