Customer-Inspired Quality (First Edition)

Overview
Why do customers go to one company and not its competitor? What do customers expect? How do customers define "service" and "quality?"

When business owners and managers compare their answers to these questions with those supplied by customers, they are often shocked to discover they know very little about what customers think of their company and its products and services. Without this information, management can only guess how to improve operations to please customers and keep them loyal.

In Customer-Inspired Quality: Looking Backward Through the Telescope, recently published by Jossey-Bass, author James G. Shaw shows managers step-by-step how to determine the way their customers define a quality version of a product or service. The book then provides a guide to implementing process improvements that lead to quantifiably better quality.

"Once you put your customer in the driver's seat, company profits will take off," says Shaw. "Competitive advantage is a result of clearly understanding the customer's expectations and consistently exceeding them."

"You don't want to waste your time improving something that customers find unimportant," he adds. "You want to focus on those areas that allow the organization to be more flexible and responsive to customer needs and desires -- and to do so in a way that allows you to measure quality improvements."

The book includes many charts and examples from a variety of industries, including healthcare organizations who have been challenged by the marketplace to pay more attention to patient satisfaction while cutting costs.

"It is customers who ultimately decide the fate of a company," Shaw says. "It's about time that companies realized they need to spend as much time looking backward at themselves from the viewpoint of the customer as they do looking outward at the marketplace and their competition."

Table of Contents (First Edition)

Chapter	Title
Introduction	Looking Backward Through The Telescope
1	Getting Off The Cliff Edge: Why improve Processes?
2	The Customer's Point of View: Who is the Customer?
3	Intelligent Tinkering: Defining a  Process using the Process Profile™ and Customer's Viewpoint.
4	Pinning Down The Protozoa: Discovering the right Performance Measures.
5	Catching The Right Wind: Step-by-Step Process Profile™ Tutorial.
6	Improving The Common Tasks: Role of Teams and Executives in effective improvement.
7	How To Eat An Elephant: Process Qualification, a systematic approach to managing improvement.
8	Plugging In: Process Performance Reviews to maintain momentum.
9	Refocusing The Telescope: Critical Success Factors in improvement.