Fostering A Culture Of Quality In Your Organization: Instilling Passion Throughout Your Team

When we consider customer service in 2024, some of us conjure up memories about our experiences, positive or negative, that have impacted our relationship with specific brands, businesses, or their products.

As a brand, Disney is a unique case study, as they have made exceptional customer service their guiding principle, or as they say, their Number 1 mission. The guiding principle at Disney focuses on sharing a common purpose, so that all of its employees are responsible for creating “happiness by providing the best in entertainment for people of all ages everywhere.” This principle sets them apart from many other brands.

The Disney Institute studies the foundations of customer service and trains their employees to ensure a defined set of quality standards inform cast members and their decision-making processes for all customer service issues. Through this approach, Disney has disrupted the culture of customer service to push everyone in its organization, every day, to look for ways to improve quality through control systems.

In Quality Assurance, teams who test software are focused on the experiences of end users, whether good or bad. However, the most important part of testing is to identify how to make immersive experiences in the digital world more enjoyable for end-users, which is a modern take on approaching customer service.

In Quality Assurance, teams who test software are focused on the experiences of end users, whether good or bad. However, the most important part of testing is to identify how to make immersive experiences in the digital world more enjoyable for end-users, which is a modern take on approaching customer service.

We talk about the importance of a positive customer experience in testing as though every interaction a customer has with your product or service leaves a lasting impression, just like a visit to a Disney park. When quality is prioritized from the development phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) through rigorous testing, it directly influences customer satisfaction and builds trust in your brand.

Conversely, when a user encounters bugs in a software product, it disrupts their workflow and adds unnecessary frustrations to their daily routines. The inability to complete tasks in a timely and productive fashion can quickly turn a good day into a bad one. Any issue that makes solving a complex problem more difficult will result in decreased traffic and potentially abandonment of a product or its respective business – ultimately the brand. That’s why when two applications solve a problem in different ways, users will typically adopt the one that simplifies their task and improves their experience.

Your visionaries must understand what users need the most and they must be able to communicate this vision throughout the team’s sprint, so the deliverable captures that vision.

Some companies invest in a Quality Assurance department assuming that, in doing so, they have assured quality for their product, but it’s not that simple. To have a quality product, your organization needs to have a culture of quality.

Visionaries working with business analysts to translate their requirements must care about their output. There is an art to effectively capturing requirements that can be utilized and implemented in the SDLC.

A software tester advocates for bugs to be resolved to achieve an immersive and memorable user-experience.

The Rule of Ten states that the further a bug moves undiscovered in the release process, the more expensive it is to rectify. That means that identifying an issue at a late stage of a digital transformation project jeopardizes the minimum viable product and often means that the priority of resolving issues requires decisions to meet target release dates.

A culture of quality ensures that your team takes ownership of this process, proactively identifying issues before they impact users. By embedding quality into every stage of development and employing strategies like Shift Left, where you create alignment in understanding deliverables across the entire software development team, organizations deliver reliable products and cultivate long-term customer loyalty, driving business success.

Leveraging the passion for quality identified by your software testers enables them to become quality advocates throughout the team and process.

Once you begin to instill the passion for quality throughout the team, it will become habit and, eventually, you will find that you have a culture of quality and that you’re releasing better products over time.

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