Quality is a mirror that shows us how good we are

We shouldn’t fear the rise of online feedback, even it can sometimes seem unforgiving! It’s all about how we use the information to make our products and our brand better. At Electrolux Group we are harnessing the power of data to take a proactive, end-to-end approach to quality.

By Carsten Franke, Chief Operations Officer

In this information age, a reactive approach to quality is no longer fit for purpose. Gone are the days when sending out a functional, reliable product to market was enough, and then if it breaks down to fix it as a quality problem.

Nowadays, quality is an end-to-end process that includes how the product is first presented (this is crucial from the consumer rating perspective), the service experience, a company’s internet presence, its efforts to lower the carbon emissions of its products: it’s the complete perception of a product and the brand.

That’s an evolution we at Electrolux Group and all consumer-focused companies have seen in lockstep with the rise of online rating systems, which give consumers the chance to provide instant feedback.

But I would argue that this is not so much an indication of consumer power, in the sense that we are powerless to deal with critical reviews. I prefer to see it as the power of data, with all the diagnostic possibilities for improvement that this brings.

The value of star ratings

The star ratings and the data they give us are a mirror, because Quality (in all its aspects, not just defectiveness!) is a mirror of how good we are: what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong and what we need to do better or change.

Even if a product does exactly what it should be doing to good effect, perhaps the initial presentation didn’t meet expectations; or the service didn’t; or the user experience was not 100% perfect.

It may seem unforgiving when someone ranks our best-ever refrigerator lower if the packaging wasn’t absolutely pleasing, but ultimately this process is a win-win for us and our customers.

We get prescriptive feedback we might not get otherwise, plus a chance to engage with the consumers in listening and responding mode, to solve their problem, and hopefully then secure their loyalty. And, last but not least, star ratings provide an immediate sentiment feedback from consumers, way faster than a service call, giving us the chance to react and improve in the crucial early moments of new product launches.

At Electrolux Group we spend a lot of time and resources on proactively harvesting information from consumer feedback, data crawling millions of web pages daily, consolidating information and then acting on what we find. Data provides us with consumer trends, so if we find out that people are saying one of our dishwashers is too noisy, we can address that by fixing issues but also refining them in our product development.

Quality as an end-to-end process

All the steps of our value chain are fundamental for the consumer experience, in what is truly an end-to-end process. We start with Market Insight analysis and the Product Specification proposition.

If you make a mistake at the beginning of the development process, and if you do not fix it in due time, you’ll have a big problem down the line. You need to involve experts in quality, engineering, production, and even your key suppliers as early as possible in the development process, so that you get all the feedback and all the details you need before you start the design process. That will prevent costly problems from arising later.

So, this is crucial for Operational Excellence, as well as being vital for securing supplier buy-in to our corporate targets, including sustainability. Through our supplier categorization system our main suppliers are now an integral part of our operations. After all, they want to make money, they want to sell their products, they want to ensure things are stable without quality problems - any issues cause them problems too.

Once a good product design is secured, the next stage is ensuring that you don’t add further complications during the industrialization process. Stick to the established goal and have the right quality gates at each stage.

Finally, when the product is being used, you must be able to monitor its performance, which brings us back to the value of data and consumer feedback, which then feeds back into the improvement cycle. And sales channels and consumer service are equally important at the end of the chain.

This is the reason why, for the first time, we are speaking of an end-to-end prevention system. We are now launching an end-to-end saving of lessons learned, supported by detailed procedures and a database of best practices. Again, this addresses all the processes along the value chain.

Quality and sustainability

One common mistake is to automatically associate quality with newness. The most sustainable, best quality product is the one that lasts longer.

There have been step changes in reducing energy consumption of our products in recent years. With the development, industrialization, production, and delivery of a new one, it’s much more sustainable to have a machine that’s working longer, as we used to see before the industry moved into the fast consumer model.

The next stage of the quality evolution is to understand that maybe in a certain period you won’t sell two washing machines; you’ll only sell one. Enabling more business and sustainable value in servicing and repairs. Maximizing usability and value of what we already have goes hand-in-hand with the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions.

Ultimately, a product’s life is not the only indicator of quality. Quality is also the fulfilment of the consumer’s expressed and unexpressed expectations and includes aspects like performance, features, cost, aesthetics, and service and that the product has a long life.

And how is Electrolux Group doing on our quality journey? Well, we’ll never achieve perfection but that’s what keeps us trying to achieve it. Everything can always be better, and that’s why we have embraced the end-to-end preventative approach to quality, with all of its challenges and exciting opportunities.