3 Quality Assurance Tools That Will Take Your Business From Good to Great
Quality over quantity is an excellent rule of thumb, especially for business owners who are trying to strengthen their brand image and reputation. To ensure that your business is meeting and surpassing your quality standards, you need to put thought and effort into your quality assurance practices while investing in the right tools to facilitate and optimize this process.
If you want your business’ reputation to be up there with the likes of Facebook and Tesla, here are three tools that will take your business’ quality from good to great.
- Call Recording Software
Just about any business is going to be fielding calls from customers. Given that these calls are often the basis for customers’ first impressions of a company, it’s vital to get them right. To treat the customers with respect, to answer their queries in a prompt and kind fashion, and to increase their likelihood of buying from your business.
The best way to make sure the quality of these calls is up to the standards you’ve set for your company (and that your employees are following the processes you’ve put in place for them) is by recording the phone calls and referring back to them. That’s where call recording software comes in. Call recording software enables you to record and play back calls, so you can spot any issues and make recommendations to remedy them in the future.
- Cause and Effect Diagrams
A cause and effect analysis helps business owners think through the causes of a corporate problem thoroughly and identify the root causes for that issue. A cause and effect diagram, also known as a fishbone diagram, is a visual representation of this analysis. The diagram allows both managers and employees to gain insight into any issues and brainstorm potential solutions. As a result, you’re able to see the weak points in your company’s quality and develop ideas for how to improve it.
There are many ways you could format a cause and effect diagram. One example is breaking down the major areas where there could be problems, such as environment, methods, equipment, and staff. Under each of these categories, analyze which components could be causing your company’s main problem. In the end, you can examine your diagram and start building solutions once you’ve got a clear picture of the hurdles you’re facing.
- Quality Audit Checklist
A quality audit checklist is a quality record that tracks the queries and responses provided during a quality audit, which is a review of an organization’s quality management system (QMS). As the name suggests, a quality audit is integral in assessing the effectiveness of a company’s service provision. The stages of a quality audit checklist include:
- Establishing the focus of the audit
- Preparing for the audit
- Performing the audit
- Reporting the findings
- Determining the corrective action (i.e. the solutions)
- Adding the corrective action to the findings report
- Implementing the corrective action
- Updating the findings report once the corrective action been completed
- Following up
