Monthly Manager Message
Chase Brown/Website Fulfillment Supervisor
Quality Assurance, The Real Customer Fanatics
I regularly get asked by non-client-facing teams how they can really be customer fanatics when they don’t have any direct interaction with the customer. It can be hard when you are up to your eyeballs in Articles to Engage, or Content to Edit or Sites to Build, to see how any of this actually impacts the customer. Whenever this comes up, I always come back to the same thing: Quality Assurance.
QA is the foundation of being a customer fanatic. The customer paid us money for a specific thing, and the QA process is there to make sure they get it. I like to think of it as the person in the drive-thru at McDonald’s, checking to make sure I got everything I ordered. In the same way, our QA criteria are designed to make sure that we ship the best version of whatever the client ordered every single time. In this regard, our QA teams are the ultimate Customer Fanatics! By reviewing all of our tasks, calls, emails, and notes, the QA teams make sure that our customers are getting the best experience every time.
But what about those of us who are not on a QA team? How can we focus more on the client to make sure they are getting what they are ordering, and having the best experience so they can succeed online? For us, I like to highlight a specific idea from a great book called Turn the Ship Around: EMBRACE THE INSPECTOR.
The idea is simple: Any opportunity for feedback is a good one, and we should not only accept that feedback but welcome it and actively seek it, to help us become even bigger customer fanatics. However, this can be difficult. Often times, this feedback can feel personal or lacking context around why something happened the way it did. I encourage everyone to muscle through the emotional reaction, to see past the excuses or odd circumstances, and look at every QA as an opportunity to learn something that will result in us being better at our jobs and more focused on our customers.
The QA teams are there to help all of us get better. I am not aware of any position at Boostability that at some point won’t have their work evaluated and critiqued in some way. When that happens, we have two options: We can complain and make excuses, or we can embrace the opportunity to get valuable feedback so that the next time, we do our jobs better. It is through the second option that we improve, show our value to the company, and ultimately, make sure that our customers get the best experience possible.
