Quality is the new KPI

Businesses are under increasing pressure to produce more with less, while delivering better experiences amid never-ending production deadlines. Metrics like sales volume, net profit margin or customer acquisition costs, while extremely important, are no longer the definitive benchmarks of a company’s success. Welcome to a new era, where quality has become a key performance indicator (KPI).

Amid this transformation, one aspect has emerged as crucial to our understanding and implementation of quality — customer feedback.

Defining aspects of quality: Through the customer feedback lens

Defining quality can be challenging due to its multifaceted and industry-dependent nature. However, one universal truth stands out: Quality is about meeting and exceeding customer expectations. This could relate to performance, reliability, durability, aesthetics, functionality or other tangible and intangible elements that customers value.

How can we ascertain these expectations accurately? The answer lies in customer feedback.

Today, customers have more options than ever to voice their opinions and experiences. They can share feedback on social media, review sites, app stores, customer surveys, community platforms, and even direct conversations. This constant stream of information offers insights into what customers value and expect, making it a vital resource in the pursuit of quality.

Quality as a KPI: Integrating customer feedback

To incorporate quality as a KPI, organizations must focus on two questions: What does quality mean for their business, and how will they measure it? And this is where customer feedback plays a critical role.

What does quality mean for your business? This definition should reflect the needs and expectations of your customers, as conveyed through their feedback. The spectrum of quality extends beyond your products or services — it also encompasses the experiences you provide to your customers. User feedback helps you understand these experiences from the customers' perspectives.

How will you measure quality? Qualitative and quantitative metrics derived from customer feedback serve as robust measures of quality. These include review ratings, unitQ Scores, Net Promoter Scores, customer satisfaction scores, and more. Advanced analytics tools like unitQ can further enrich these metrics by identifying trends and areas of improvement in the vast sea of customer feedback.

Quality is intrinsically linked to vital business KPIs

Best of all, quality ties to bread-and-butter KPIs surrounding critical business components. Consider:

Customer satisfaction: A high-quality product or service not only meets customer expectations but also often exceeds them, leading to improved customer satisfaction levels.

Brand reputation: Quality impacts how the public perceives your brand. With a high-quality offering, you can cultivate a positive brand reputation, leading to increased customer loyalty and advocacy.

Operational efficiency: By investing in quality, businesses can reduce errors, churn, rework, or product returns — resulting in improved operational efficiency and profitability.

The pivotal role of AI in harnessing user feedback

Embracing customer feedback is just the beginning. The real challenge lies in managing and analyzing this wealth of data to extract actionable insights. 

Artificial intelligence can automate the analysis of large volumes of customer feedback — highlighting key themes and sentiment trends, predicting product defects, feature requests, and identifying potential opportunities for improvement. unitQ's AI can comprehend the context and nuances of customer reviews and feedback, allowing for a more in-depth understanding of customer perceptions. By leveraging this, businesses can not only meet quality expectations but consistently exceed them, thus staying ahead of the competition.

Quality and customer feedback: An indivisible duo

As we usher in an era where quality serves as a new KPI, customer feedback stands front and center. It provides valuable insights that drive continuous improvement and innovation, ultimately leading to higher quality products, services and experiences. When you invest in quality, you're investing in the long-term success of your business, and there is no better compass on this journey than the voice of your customers.

About unitQ

With unitQ customer feedback software, you can discover quality issues at the same time as your users. Know what product launches, releases or evergreen features are causing the most bugs or support tickets. Drill into the root causes of these issues by source, platform, device, customer segment and more.

Our AI centralizes feedback from all feedback sources and automatically groups it into thousands of granular categories to help organizations discover what matters most to users — all in real time. Customer-centric companies like Spotify, Bumble, Pinterest and HelloFresh rely on unitQ for actionable insights to drive growth, reduce churn and build brand loyalty. 

Want to see how your organization compares to others? Get your free unitQ Score or book a unitQ demo today!

Follow unitQ on Linkedin and Twitter. 

Christian Wiklund is unitQ CEO and Co-Founder. Niklas Lindsrom is unitQ CTO and Co-Founder.