Everyone is Not a Customer in TQM
Total Quality Management stresses customer focus, but that does not mean trying to please everyone. Attempting to satisfy people who will never buy from you wastes effort and can pull a business away from the people it actually serves. Knowing who your customers are — and are not — is part of managing quality.
Questions you may have include:
- What does “customer” mean in TQM?
- Why isn’t everyone a customer?
- What is an internal customer?
Defining your real customers
Your customers are the specific people or organizations whose needs your product or service is meant to meet. Identifying that target group lets you concentrate resources on understanding and satisfying them, rather than spreading effort thinly across everyone.
The cost of serving non-customers
Trying to be everything to everyone usually means doing nothing especially well. Chasing requests from people outside your market can distort the product, raise costs, and frustrate the customers you do have. Focus is itself a quality decision.
Internal customers
TQM also broadens the idea of “customer” inside the organization. Each step in a process receives work from the previous step and passes it to the next — so the next process is your customer. Treating colleagues downstream as customers, and giving them clean, correct work, improves the quality of the final result that reaches the external customer.
Summary
Customer focus does not mean serving everyone. Define the specific customers your product is for, avoid the cost of chasing non-customers, and remember that the next step in any process is an internal customer whose needs also matter to overall quality.