Is 99% Satisfaction Good Enough?
One day I had a listing appointment with a client that was referred to me because of my skills in “Alternative Financing” and moving properties that nobody else has been able to sell.
Anyway, as I printed the Mapquest to his house, there was an ad at the top of the printout that was for Genuine Hewlett-Packard Ink for your printer. It said: “1 out of every 4 refilled inkjet cartridges will fail. Trust HP inks for 99% quality” or something along those lines. Their point was the they only have a 1% failure rate as compared to 25% failure rate among refills.
It reminded me of a handout that I shared with my Women’s Group a while back, and I wanted to share it with you today . First, look at your mindset and your business, what quality level would YOU accept if you were put in charge of a product or service? 90%? 95? 98? 99? How about 99.9%? Many big companies think that a 99.9% quality rate is good, in fact, Motorola commits to acheive “Six Sigma” which is less that 3 rejects per million items produced!
Here’s some examples of what a 99.9% quality level would equal:
- -12 newborns would be given to the wrong parents every day
- -114,500 pairs of mismatched shoes would be shipped per year
- -18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled per HOUR
- -2 Million documents will be lost by the IRS this year
- -2.5 Million books would be shipped with the wrong covers
- -315 entries in Webster’s dictionary would be misspelled
- -20,000 wrong drug prescriptions would be written
- -5.5 million cases of soft drinks would be produced with no fizz
- -3,056 copies of tomorrows wall street journal would be missing a section
- -880,000 credit cards in circulation would have the wrong info coded on the magnetic strip
Does that make you think a little differently about your acceptable levels in your business? Just a thought!
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