Quality Service is Never a Mystery or a Mistake

One of the unfortunate results of cutting my technology teeth in academic and enterprise businesses is that I often approached technology from a purely technical perspective. For example, what color should the network cables be? Answer: Whatever fits the technical specs and is available in bulk at a reasonable price. 

For example, when a company like HP is wiring a building the size of a warehouse, no one cares what color the wires are.

... and then I started working in small business. I'll never forget the day that we were one office into setting up the network for a twelve-office organization. The owner came in and asked, "Do the wires have to be blue? Everything else in our office is beige, off-white, or earth tones. 

I grew up poor. We only had the box of eight crayons. My brain understand blue and red and green. So there was no chance that I would even consider looking for beige network cables. But I did know that we could get white. I offered up white cables instead.

The client told me that's fine. Then she added, "Don't you think white cables would look better at all of your clients than blue - unless they have a blue office?"

This fall deep into the territory labeled, I would never have thought about that. But it made perfect sense. As with so many checklists in our business, I simply added the question, "Do you have a preference for the color of the cables?" to job specifications.

“The essence of sustainable competitive advantage is:

1) The obvious;

2) The little things;

3) The accumulation of little things over the years.”

— Tom Peters

Too often, MSPs take the approach that technicians either are good, or are not good, with the details. When it comes to a new laptop setup, we give them a detailed checklist. Did you remove all the junk software? Did you apply all the patches? and so forth.

That list grows and gets fine-tuned over time. The goal is to make sure that every little thing is perfect, to the extent it can be. You never want to be driving away from a client's office and get an email asking why Adobe Acrobat wasn't installed. 

ALL technicians are good, if they work inside a system that's good. All technicians are haphazard when they work inside a system that's haphazard.

Most of the time, it's appropriate for us to focus on the technical. Do we have the right hardware, the right software, the right services for the job? Are things configured correctly? Did we do everything well, in order, and document it? Check. Check. Check.

But from the client's perspective, there are lots of non-technical considerations. Back in the day, selling big, clunky, ugly desktop computers was fine. It made people feel that they actually bought something worth the exorbitant price. Today, people want technology to be more elegant or even invisible. Part of your job is to make sure the job is esthetically pleasing as well as technically awesome.

How do you train tech-first employees to ask where a machine should go, how the wires should be managed, or the color of the cables? Give them a checklist! They are certainly capable of having those conversations. It's up to you to make sure they do have the conversation (or you do, or the sales person does).

As with everything else in your business, quality never just happens. You need to make it happen. And being consistently better at "the accumulation of little things over the years" is part of your brand. Are you the company that does sloppy work, always forgets one thing, and is plagued by re-work? Or are you the company that does awesome work the first time and makes the client glad they made the investment? Neither of those happens by accident.

Quality control is not a mystical art. Anyone can be good at it. You just need to make it part of your checklists from the beginning.

:-)