The Seapine View

The prefix meta- is used to mean about its own category. For example, under the umbrella of business intelligence you often hear the term “metadata” which means data concerning data. For purposes of this short post, “metaquality” could be described as the process and operations through which quality assurance impacts the quality of the customer experience (quality concerning quality) through all phases of the customer lifecycle. Your customers generally move through a decision making process which opens the gate for multiple functional areas to have potential impact on the customer experience:

• Awareness and need identification
• Explore and qualify alternatives
• Solution discovery and evaluation
• Negotiation and purchase decision
• Implementation and post sales service
• After purchase acclimation and evaluation

At each strategic stage of the process, research & development, marketing, sales, services and finance will have various levels of influence on the quality of the overall customer experience; which means quality assurance during all phases of the customer lifecycle is critical. In the Seapine Software Quality-Ready Assessment we asked respondents: “What level of priority does your company currently assign to building quality into your software development environment?”  Nearly 65% of our over 900 respondents rated their software quality initiatives as high or one of their top priorities. However; it also appears that many companies are still not committed to quality improvement.  In other words, they are only paying lip service about quality, and as a result there is a discrepancy with how their customers view the relationship.  Consider the following statistics from the Cutter Consortium, an IT advisory firm.

• 32% of organizations say they release software with too many defects.
• 38% of organizations believe they lack an adequate software quality assurance program.
• 27% of organizations do not conduct any formal quality reviews.

The current combination of declining customer satisfaction levels and economic concerns is creating the perfect customer experience storm.  In this type of business climate those companies that focus on quality will be the ones that come out on top. That means a relentless and coordinated approach to quality improvement across all functional areas has never been more important.

I serve as a member of the Advisory Council for CustomerThink.com.  CustomerThink is a global online community of business leaders who strive to create profitable customer-centric (CRM) business strategies.  The July CustomerThink editorial calendar focuses on the use of technology to power up customer management. In fact, the main focus is on how technology can help accelerate the success of customer-centric strategies. Customer feedback is critical to customer-centric strategies; if the truth be known, often times the feedback is not exactly good news. For example, software companies sometimes receive bug reports and feature requests from their customers. Yes, despite their best effort to ensure quality, a glitch in the software application may occur. And despite best efforts to really listen to their target market, there is always room for improvement, meaning feature requests.

Many times customers have to fill out a report form and either fax, mail, or email it to a technical support department where it is then hand-entered into the master bug database. This low-tech procedure provides no support for file attachments (for example – screen shots) and leaves room for communication error. In addition, the customer is not automatically notified that their issue has been added to future projects.

For ISV’s technology opportunities exist that allow for more effective and efficient beta programs and software releases. This technology allows customers to submit bug reports and feature requests directly into the issue management and defect tracking tool thus eliminating data entry errors and also saving data entry time. Are you likely to find these types of solutions under the normal CRM banner? No; but they are intended to keep your customer-focused strategy on track nevertheless.