Quality: From Customer Needs to Customer Satisfaction, 3rd Edition

Citation

Narasimhan, K. (2011), "Quality: From Customer Needs to Customer Satisfaction, 3rd Edition", The TQM Journal, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 358-359. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542731111124398

In this new millennium, qualities of services and software have become as important as those of quality of goods. Also, it has become imperative to satisfy customers by assessing their needs and expectations and ensuring that those are met or even exceeded. In this third edition, Bergman and Klefsjo explain concepts, tools and techniques to identify and understand the needs and expectations of the customers, how to translate those needs and expectations into products' (goods, services, and experiences) features, produce and deliver them with after sales support.

The authors are leading Swedish academics with many years of experience in the quality field.

The book is divided into six parts. Part VI contains four statistical tables needed to understand the text in the previous five parts. It also contains 34 pages of references and an index. The five parts start with a brief introduction and end with Notes and References. The text of the five parts is well supported by 347 exhibits.

Part I, comprising three chapters, first deals with the concepts of quality, customer and stakeholders, and dimensions of quality of goods and services. The second chapter discusses the relations between quality improvements, and costs, profitability and success. The final chapter briefly examines the evolution of the quality movement from the Industrial Revolution to present day.

Part II on “Design for quality” deals with methodologies and tools, which facilitate a customer‐focused product development, in five chapters. Topics covered in order are development methodologies for products, services and software; quality function deployment; reliability; design of experiments; robust design.

Part III on production for quality also comprises five chapters and covers methodologies and tools to prevent poor quality and to improve and control quality. Topics covered include statistical process control (SPC), The seven improvement tools, control charts, capability studies, and supplier partnership.

Part IV is about quality as customer satisfaction and comprises three chapters. It deals with concepts of satisfaction and loyalty of external and internal customers, and how to measure them. Noriaki Kano's model of customer needs and satisfaction is covered in some depth in Chapter 14, which also covers the SERVQUAL approach. Chapter 15 covers all aspects of internal customer satisfaction and the relation between internal and external customer satisfaction. Chapter 16 is a brief one on customer satisfaction index.

Part V on leadership for quality is the longest one comprising eight chapters. It focuses on the importance of sincere and serious commitment of top management for quality improvements by focussing on processes and their management. The chapter on leadership deals with a comparison of managers versus leaders and the importance of communication skills, Deming's 14 points and profound knowledge, learning organisations and TQM as a management system. The following three chapters successively deal with mission, vision, goals and strategies; processes, process management methodology, roles of different stakeholders, an illustration of a process improvement, etc.; and quality management systems such as the ISO 9000 series. The following three chapters deal respectively with The Deming Prize, MBNQA, and EFQM Excellence Award, their criteria, and how they can be used for self assessment; the seven management or new QC tools; and improvement and business development programs (QC circles, suggestion systems, ABB Sweden's customer focus, six sigma, and lean production). The final chapter deals with a discussion of the importance of quality management in order to create a sustainable society in the future.

This book is well written in a lucid language that is easy to grasp and understand. It will serve as an invaluable handbook not only for students and but also for interested quality practitioners. It illustrates with examples how Japanese industrialists adopted and developed American quality gurus' ideas, and how these methodologies are being exported to the rest of the world, including USA.