Quality goals are specific targets that are set to improve the quality of a product, service, or process. They are often developed as part of a broader quality assurance strategy or as part of a performance management system. Quality goals are designed to help organizations identify areas where they need to improve and to establish clear targets for improvement. By setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) quality goals, organizations can more effectively track progress and ensure that they are making progress towards their desired quality outcomes. The following are examples of quality goals.
- Defects: Reducing the number of defects discovered by quality control.
- Quality Control: Improving the quality control process itself.
- Measurement: Measuring new quality metrics.
- Benchmarking: Comparing your product or service quality to your competitors and industry.
- Reporting: Capturing valuable measurements and communicating them.
- Durability: Increasing the durability of products with new designs, materials and methods.
- Service Quality: The quality of services is typically measured with intangible elements such as wait time.
- Customer Ratings: Improving ratings on external sites such as a hotel that is concerned with improving review scores on a popular travel site.
- Customer Experience: Internal measures of the customer experience such as turnaround time for requests.
- Customer Satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is a common way to measure quality for both products and services.
- Availability: The availability of services, particular digital services.
- Data Quality: Addressing data quality issues such as the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of data.
- Process Quality: The quality of process outputs such as a billing process that produces monthly customer invoices.
- Supply: The quality of supplied components, parts and materials.
- Traceability: Improving the tracking of things so that quality problems can be investigated, isolated and managed.
- Consistency: Making products and services predictable, stable and consistent.
- Standards: The implementation of external or internal quality standards.
- Human Error: Reducing human error with improved policy, procedure, processes, systems and training.
- Information Security: In many cases, a quality assurance team acts as oversight for information security issues, particularly security issues related to compliance.
- Safety: Reducing health and safety risks.
- Compliance: Compliance to laws, regulations, standards and internal policies such as best practices.
- Monitoring: Implementing controls to monitor processes, procedures and other elements that impact quality.
- Logistics: Improving inbound and outbound logistics where this impacts quality. For example, a firm that views late deliveries as damaging to the customer experience.
- Training: Training designed to reduce incidents or improve service or product quality.
- Incident Management: The process of responding to customer impacting issues.
- Problem Management: The process of investigating and fixing the root cause of incidents.
