Reasons for the Failure of Quality and Customer Satisfaction Initiatives
January 2004
By: Robert Desatnick

This article is based upon your author's personal experiences a quality professional consultant.

One often - neglected aspect of superior quality service is that CEOs tend to ignore internal customer satisfaction as they do to external customer satisfaction. This enables their organizations in financial success and in becoming the employer of choice.

Briefly, from the lessons I've leaned, if an organization is to achieve superior quality in all that it undertakes, the CEO must serve as an example, taking the lead role in employee and customer satisfaction. This mandates a strong personal commitment of time and resources on a continuous basis. 
It cannot and must be delegated to lower levels of the organization. In those initiatives that fail to achieve their full potential, I have discovered nine common denominators that contributed to that failure.

1. Inadequate top management involvement, participation, commitment and support.

• Senior management, on the surface, commits itself to excellence in all that they do. They even, on occasion, fund the total quality effort. Having given lip service to Total Quality Management (TQM), delegated to the marketing, operations or human resources director, and that's the end of that.
• A steering committee with members of the senior management team is not established.
• Management fails to participate in training as facilitators and team leaders.

2. Absence of a strategic quality planning process.

Senior management tends to be overly preoccupied with the following:

• Quarterly earning reports
• Downsizing or right sizing
• Cost reductions
• Sales and profits in the short - term

If quality is not specifically planned for, both short - term and long - term, it simply will not happen. Many of the organizations I've personally assessed as a Malcolm Baldrige examiner
that had both a 1 - 3 year and 3 - 5 year strategic quality plan also had the highest levels of customer satisfaction. An important part of these strategic quality plans is the top management
monthly review, wherein each department and function head formally reports his/ her quality progress to the management steering committee, which consists of the CEO and his or her direct reports.

3. Insufficient attention to internal customer satisfaction.

• There is a failure to recognize that customer relation mirror employee relations. Thus, no attempt is made to:
• Measure internal customer satisfaction
• Reduce cycle times
• Improve internal working relationships

Management fails to recognize that everyone in the organization has at least two roles:

• Each is a customer of someone else, i.e., they receive products, services, subassemblies or information from others.
• Each is someone else's customer service, i.e., they provide products, services, subassemblies or information to others.

4. Insufficient training of team leaders, facilitators and team participants

This is, in my opinion, the second most important cause of failed TQM efforts.
In our experiences with the banking, automotive and health care industries, we noted
the following:
Normally, the human resource person or operations manager reads a book or a 
few articles on training. They proceed to do the following:
     Ø Form a small committee of equally unknowledgeable people
     Ø Develop a quick approach to get quality improve teams started
     Ø Seek volunteers; and because this is the first time someone has asked employee's opinions, get volunteers
     Ø The result is team meetings that are unproductive because team members do not know what to do or how approach their initial enthusiasm, a few stop attending meetings and teams gradually dissolve.

5. Improper or non- existent alignment of objectives.

People protect their turf. Consequently, sales people make commitments to customers that operations cannot possibly fulfill; order entry notes mistakes or incomplete information on sales orders. Credit is bypassed and shipping works overtime along with operations to provide customer satisfaction.

6. Information is not shared among different departments and functions.

Knowledge is power. To some, sharing information is sharing power and it weakens their position. Each department and each function develops its own database of information and the only common denominator is usually the monthly financial report. One of the largest deficiencies of organizations is that customer satisfaction trends.

7. Too many initiative and too many goals.

All too often TQM efforts are undertaken in the midst of the following:

• Management changes
• Merges, acquisitions or joint ventures
• Downsizing or right sizing
• Organization development efforts
• New performance management systems 
• Refinancing efforts
• Reorganization
• New computer systems

The circuits become overloaded and TQM efforts become fragmented; people are pulled in too many different directions.

8. TQM not viewed as a way of life - as a process for continuous improvement.

In focus group conducted in a number of industries, middle managers, supervisors and 
employees felt that TQM was just another program to reduce costs and people. The
comment heard often: If we long enough, it will go away. Additionally, management 
failed to communicate the real purpose of TQM, which should be:

• To improve customer satisfaction
• To increase market share
• To provide job security, pay increases and promotions
• To give employees more latitude and decision making as it affects their jobs

This is not to say that a TQM effort should be launched with bells, whistles, banners and
badges, but rather a focused, low profile effort aimed at early success, which means a 
positive impact on customer satisfaction and all that this implies.

9. No early success stories.

Far too often it becomes a race to see how many cross - functional quality improvement
teams can be launched. One result is that the teams choose very complex projects such as total system do take one to three years for successful completion. My own criteria for early efforts dictate that projects should be brought to successful conclusion within three to six months of the starting date. This implies that facilitators, team leaders and members have been trained in: 

• Criteria for project selection
• Problem solving skills
• Cost / benefit analysis
• Behavioral / interpersonal skills

Lessons Learned : 
Customer satisfaction is the degree of happiness your customers experience with your 
products and services, resulting from the positive interaction of all employees within the 
organization. Recognize that every employee is a customer of someone else within the 
organization who provides services, information, products or components. Similarly, 
each employee has customer (s) for their products or services. If an organization is
to achieve superior quality in all that it undertakes, the CEO must serve as an example, 
taking the lead role in employee and customer satisfaction. This mandates a personal 
commitment of time and resources on a continuous basis. Anything less will result in
failure as noted in the nine reasons for underachievement. 

Robert L. Desatnick is the president of creative Human Resources Consultants, helping organizations to exceed customers' expectations in a quality- driven world. He has earned a M.B.A. with distinction from Washington University, has authored 10 books and 18 articles on the topic of human resource utilization and development, customer satisfaction and retention, total quality management. In addition to serving universities, he is also a quality examiner for the national, Michigan and Illinois Malcolm Baldrige Awards, and as a Certified Lead Quality Systems Auditor for ISO 9000 Quality Standards. He can be reached at bob@chrconsult.com or on the Web at www.chrconsult.com