With many creative agencies continually adopting the latest internal trends to stay ahead of the game, it’s essential for those in the industry to keep up in order to stand out from competitors.
Quality assurance (QA) is simply described as maintaining a desired level of quality in a service or product, focusing on every stage of the process throughout production and delivery.
Relating to creative agencies, QA is any systematic process to ensure a service meets specified requirements, determining and maintaining these needs throughout production and delivery.
Quality assurance supported by ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation)
ISO is a guideline for the majority of QA processes and procedures, providing organisations, of any size, with an internal model to enable them to consistently meet their customer’s expectations. Specifically relating to quality management, the ISO 9001 standard consists of a structure of strong customer focus, top management and continual improvement for businesses – helping them to provide their clients with a consistent, high quality service.
With ISO standards continually evolving and being updated to keep up with the ever-changing industries, QA is usually combined with ISO as a synergised system to support the continuation of strong internal business processes.
Why is quality assurance important?
By individually defining the standards around the internal processes of each business, QA supports organisations to create and offer services that meet the expectations, needs and requirements of clients.
QA standards proactively help to prevent service defects before they occur, as processes aims to optimise internal work efficiency and effectiveness.
This in turn increases client trust, confidence and loyalty, as well as a business’s credibility, all while improving internal processes and efficiency – allowing companies to stand out from its competitors.
How an integrated system can enhance quality assurance
By adopting quality assurance through ISO standardisation, each team member must work in line with the internal process guidelines created.
QA is all about structure of procedures, therefore, adopting an integrated system into your business can further improve your team’s organisation, efficiency and service delivery – all to support client delight. How? See below:
• Preventing client overservicing
Organisation is an essential part of any business, but even more so when it comes to client servicing. Helping your team to stay within client budgets is key to preventing overservicing – adding to your business’s successful delivery of client delight.
Using an integrated system, job scheduling allows your team to view the tasks they need to complete, and within which timeframes. An integrated system also enables your team to update their timesheets, allowing you to analyse time management and finance control. You can also review if additional capacity is needed – preventing the occurrence of late delivery or missed deadlines.
• Supporting your employees
As a manager, it’s important to look out for signs of team members feeling overstretched or overworked. Reviewing timesheets can support employee reviews, allowing your team to continue to deliver strong client work – further enhancing client satisfaction.
Remember, a healthy workplace leads to a healthy service delivery.
• Streamlining essential documents
Using an online system to streamline all essential client documents into one place ensures easy accessibility for everyone – avoiding any potential mistakes because of missing information or data.
This all supports your business’ quality assurance, as an integrated system can maximise team efficiency and effectiveness – due to staying within client budgets, delivering on time and presenting client work which is of a high quality.
Improving client delight
As quality assurance is key to client delight, an integrated system supports simultaneous working processes for each team member – meaning the output will always be the same, regardless of which team member completes tasks.
When it comes to creative agencies, time is expensive. Costs can be reduced due to the minimisation of repeated errors – avoiding essential time spent on customer support, as well as potential lost clients due to dissatisfaction of service delivery.
The quality of your business’s services is key to standing out from your competitors, and QA helps businesses to deliver services that meet the needs and expectations of their clients. High quality services lead to satisfied clients, client loyalty, repeat purchase and advocacy.
For more information on how an integrated system can support your business’s quality assurance, book a free demo with Concept.