Measuring Internal Quality Through Quality Assurance

When it comes to quality, the term itself is extremely broad, meaning different things to different people. For us here at Aptean, at its most basic level, quality means meeting the needs of our customers, not just in terms of the products we offer but in terms of the holistic customer experience, from initial contact onwards.

As such, we look at assuring quality in every single one of our customer engagements. At the heart of everything we do is a focus on managing our customers’ expectations and then ensuring the quality of approach matches the quality of outcomes at every level.

Documentation, single customer journey, product delivery and customer involvement are a few key aspects that play a significant part in working towards our high-quality standards.

Documentation

When I say quality is embedded in everything we do, I mean everything, right down to the documentation we provide to customers at each step of their journey with us. For example, we produce statements of work (SOW) for every customer. These comprehensive documents outline exactly what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do it, and, if possible, the deadline by which we’re going to do it. Before being presented to our customers, these SOWs go through a rigorous peer-review process, something that has significantly improved the quality of these statements, enabling us to set a high-quality standard at this early stage.

The same quality of documentation applies to all customer documents we produce, from initial sales proposals through to technical guides, embedding our commitment to quality at every possible customer touchpoint.

Single Customer Journey

We’re very aware that customers will deal with different experts depending on which stage of the journey they’re at, and we’re mindful of ensuring consistency of approach across all our team members. We know that a problem businesses can face during the early sales process is buying into the concept of just how much a solution can do for them, only to realize once they’re at the actual project stage that what they’ve seen, may never actually be delivered.

With this in mind, we ensure the representation of key business functions throughout the sales process. This includes the representation of project resources to help customers not only help us understand what they want to achieve but for us to provide feedback on how we can help them achieve their objectives.

Product Delivery

When it comes to delivering the robust complaint management solution that our customers need, Aptean Respond’s commitment to quality continues. We start with a best practice system, with pre-built configurations pre-loaded with the functionality needed for the particular sector in which the customer operates. This means the customer is off to the best start possible, benefiting from the time and expertise we invest in our systems to ensure they can fulfill regulatory and legal requirements and obligations before we even begin to implement customer-specific functionality.

Customer Involvement

Our involvement doesn’t end with the implementation though, as user training is a vital component of the process. We ensure there is a consistent, standard training agenda, providing a framework within which we all operate. Working within this framework, the training can be tailored to suit the specific needs of each business. We set the standard high and then garner feedback from customers to ensure we’re maintaining those very standards we’ve set ourselves.

With our complaints management software, Aptean Respond, we make a point to constantly and consistently include our customers in every stage of the project delivery process. Showcasing and demonstrating what we’re building and configuring before it even gets into a test environment is one aspect that has proven to be very powerful. Despite having been through a design process, there is nothing like seeing the actual solution. Showcasing the complaint management solution early allows us to work with our customers to capture feedback and ensure we’re all in alignment as to how the solution will meet their needs; this creates another benefit of ensuring there are no unexpected surprises once we’re into the test phase. Fundamentally, it helps to ensure a quality solution is presented for testing, one that aligns well with an agreed design, and helps our customers to know what they should be expecting from us, not only in terms of functionality but in terms of that all-important quality standard as well.

For us, instilling quality and quality assurance in everything we do and every customer interaction we have is vital. Not only does this reinforce customer confidence in our team, products and company, but it underpins our commitment to continuous improvement, informing valuable change with tangible feedback from customers and our own review processes. For us, quality assurance isn’t a nice-to-have but plays a crucial role in our ability to not only meet our customers’ expectations but to exceed them every step of the way.

For more information on Aptean Respond, reach out to us today.