Every customer who acquires a product or service receives a set of characteristics encompassing a range of features, such as convenience, promptness in delivery, warranty, credit availability, and packaging. The consumer’s view of quality reflects more than whether the product or service delivers as it was intended, its rate of failure, or the probability of purchasing a defective unit. The customer perceives quality as a product’s or service’s ability to meet and satisfy all specified needs. When high quality producers dominate a market, entering companies must understand both their own customers’ quality expectations and their competitors’ quality standards.
Following eight characteristics that would commonly be included in any customer’s definition of product quality. An important difference exists between the first six and the last two characteristics: level of objectivity. The first six characteristics can be reasonably evaluated through objective methods, whereas the last two are strictly subjective. Thus, the first six are much more susceptible to control by an organization than the other two.
1. Performance—relates to a product’s primary operating characteristics
2. Features—describes the secondary characteristics that supplement a product’s basic function
3. Reliability—addresses the probability of a product’s likelihood of performing properly within a specified period of time
4. Conformance—relates to the degree to which preestablished standards are matched by the product’s performance and features
5. Durability—measures a product’s economic and technical life
6. Serviceability—measures the ease with which the product is repaired
7. Aesthetics—relates to a product’s appeal to the senses
8. Perceived quality—relates to image, brand names, and other indirect measures of quality
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