Improving Service Quality : Achieving High Performance in the Public and Private Sectors

Organizations are struggling to improve customer-focused quality in today's highly competitive domestic and global markets. Better design, implementation, and daily management of quality improvement strategies is essential for survival. Quality improvement principles, when thoughtfully applied and appropriately modified to meet all types of customer demands, are a sound means to respond to changing markets. However, when various quality and productivity theories and methods are applied without changing the organizational culture, it is very difficult to consistently deliver quality results. This important new book focuses on quality improvement methods for high performance in public and private services not covered in other books: applications focus on construction, education, government, insurance, public utilities, health care, and nonprofit services. Rather than detailing the technical processes to achieve inspection, planning, quality auditing, statistics, or risk assessment, this book presents step-by-step guidelines, recommendations, and action plans for changing service organizations to implement quality improvements. Sound theory and careful strategic planning are presented to assist readers in developing an understanding of how to select the essential elements of systems that best fit their customers' needs.