How to design a quality reference system and get the teams to adhere to it?

As part of our collaboration with QCM, a customer relationship measurement and improvement company, we recently assisted a major site manager in setting up a visitor relationship improvement process.

The specificity of the Inéa / QCM approach is to combine measurement (mystery shopper) and training (customer relationship management, reception, etc.). The danger of this type of approach lies in the rejection of employees or service providers who may feel "flipped on" by the mystery shopper. One of the key success factors is to succeed in making people understand that this is a performance improvement approach.

The best way to do this is to involve the teams upstream through dedicated work groups.

These groups must involve all the players who will be integrated into the quality process. In our case, this meant operations managers, infrastructure managers and managers of key providers

Ideally, we should not exceed 8/10 people per group. We can therefore divide the subject into several parts. For example, in the case of the site manager, we entrusted the working groups with 2 stages of the reference system (which included 6 stages: parking lots, catering, reception, signage, etc.)

In order to successfully lead these working groups, it is necessary to facilitate "breaking out of the framework". The best way to do this is to receive a strong message from the general management and to start with a game that allows you to get out of the constraints and let your creativity express itself!

At the end of these working groups, we obtain a list of key criteria in the company's activity. These criteria are prioritized according to their "must-have" and "most" character.

It is up to the company's management to validate these criteria. And possibly to add complements. This allows the company's management to be involved in the process and thus to have everyone participate.

Once the key criteria have been validated, the translation of these criteria into operational questions that can be directly used by the mystery shoppers to express factually the reality of their field experience.

We can add that it may be useful to also ask the working groups about the operational implementation of the approach:

- Internal communication

- Training of teams

- Creation of a quality charter and promotion in the field...

Don't forget to train the teams to:
-present the approach
- debrief the results
- reframe behaviors that are not valuable to the company