CUSTOMER PERCEPTION OF QUALITY

Quality is what customer perceives it to be. However, as the customers go on changing their needs, the quality level needs are to be improved continuously to meet the customers demand. That’s why the basic concept of TQM philosophy is continuous process improvement.

An American Society for Quality (ASQ) survey ranked the customer perceptions in the following order:

Performance, Features, Service, Warranty, Price, and Reputation.

1. Performance

✓ Performance involves “fitness for use”. It indicates that the product and service is ready for the customers’ use at the time of sale.

✓ Other considerations include:

1. Availability: It is the probability that a product will operate when needed.
2. Reliability: It is freedom from failure over time.
3. Maintainability: It is the ease of keeping the product operable.

2. Features

✓ Features are secondary characteristics of the product or service.

✓ For example, the primary function of a cell phone is for communication, whereas other facilities such as calculator and alarm are features of the cell phone.

 3. Service

✓ Customer service is an intangible in nature. Intangible characteristics are those traits that are not quantifiable, but it contributes greatly to customer satisfaction.

✓ Organizations objective is to provide good quality of the product to the customer at the right time, even though the customers are not complaining about their service.

4. Warranty

✓ The product warranty represents an organization’s public promise of a quality product. In other words, it represents a public commitment to guarantee a level of service sufficient to satisfy the customer.

✓ A warranty forces the organization to focus on the customers’ definition of product and service quality. It also forces the organization to develop a corrective action system.

✓ In present scenario, the warranty attracts and builds the market. It encourages customers to buy a service by reducing the risk of the purchase decision. Hence it generates more sales from existing customers by enhancing loyalty.

5. Price

✓ Nowadays customer is willing to pay a higher price to obtain value. Also customers expect high quality products at the lower price.

✓ Customers are preferring the organisations who are providing the greatest value for their money. For this purpose, customers are constantly evaluating all the organisations.

✓ In our highly competitive environment, each customer’s concept of value is continually changing. In order to overcome this challenge, the organisations should identify, verify and update each customer’s perception of value in relation to each product and service regularly.

6. Reputation

✓ It is obvious that customers are willing to buy products or service from a known, trusted and reputed organisation. The total customer satisfaction is based on, not only with the product, the entire experience with the organisation.

✓ Thus reputation of a firm brings the market to them. So organisation should strive for customers for life.

Factors Influencing Customer Perception of Quality

Table 1.1 examines the factors that influence customer perception of quality.