How Can TQM Empower Employees?

In the present day, there are a myriad of challenges that developing enterprises have to contend with in the pursuit of success, not least of which is the ever-changing needs of the modern consumer. Recent years have brought about a tangible shift in customer preferences, as consumers are placing more importance on experiences with brands than ever before.

In such a climate, companies that boast the best product or service are not guaranteed to win over their competition as they once might have been. Rather, to accommodate modern consumers, businesses must create a cohesive and wholly-gratifying modern customer experience for their consumers. That means achieving excellence company-wide and empowering employees to maximize your organization’s value.

This is where Total Quality Management (TQM) can be a genuine game-changer for your business. 

What is a TQM?

Total Quality Management is a management approach that embodies a holistic view of business success. With TQM, a business strives to achieve an exceptional level of performance in every facet of its operations, on both a macro and micro scale and aims to reach its goals organically by optimizing processes.

At the heart of the TQM philosophy is a strong concept of quality. Those who embrace this approach view quality as something intrinsic rather than superficial. As such, TQM adopters do not seek to create or even achieve quality but rather to embody it and make it a core part of their companies’ identities.

Due to its scope, TQM encompasses a wide variety of principles that serve to foster excellence at a company, from manufacturing and product testing to marketing, sales, and customer service. By putting measures in place to encourage continuous improvement in every area, companies can improve efficiency and achieve greater ROI on their efforts.

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What can TQM do for a business?

TQM can bring a variety of significant benefits to an ambitious, developing enterprise. 

One of the primary benefits is operational efficiency. By creating an internal culture of continuous improvement, a company can iterate on its processes to optimize them over time. This eliminates resource wastage and revenue leakage, which improves the overall performance of the business.

Adopting TQM also encourages companies to embrace a data-driven approach to business. This promotes an analytical mentality and more intelligent, informed decision-making at the top level. By garnering actionable insights from data analysis and incorporating them into future planning, companies can devise more comprehensive business strategies that drive growth and yield greater ROI in the long term. 

Most importantly, TQM helps to produce a high level of customer satisfaction. Through the creation of an improvement culture and the continuous optimization of processes, it’s possible to exceed customer expectations on a routine basis. This result is immense consumer engagement, a positive brand perception, and increased revenue through repeat business and referrals. 

For those who embrace Total Quality Management, the customer is at the top of the totem pole, but is the employees who allow it to stand tall. For the principles of TQM to take root and yield dividends, there must be a high degree of employee involvement at every organizational level. For this reason, employee empowerment is considered one of the core tenets of TQM.

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How can TQM affect employees’ experience and productivity?

When implemented effectively, TQM can have a substantial effect on both the experience and productivity of employees. There are three primary reasons for this:

Firstly, TQM helps to create more effective training and development programs for employees. By consciously seeking out the latest training methods and most advanced onboarding technologies, companies can help employees to acquire new skills and achieve optimal proficiency in their roles. This makes them more efficient and increases employee satisfaction due to an elevated sense of competency.

Secondly, TQM creates a culture of innovation. In the pursuit of organization-wide excellence, a company can create an environment in which employees have the bandwidth to engage in critical thinking and problem-solving. This helps to create a more engaged and dynamic workforce that is continually evolving itself.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, TQM instills a sense of responsibility in employees. By creating a workplace that emphasizes excellence in every aspect, businesses place their evolution in the hands of their employees. This trust helps them to understand that their contributions have value, which boosts morale and performance, and encourage active participation in the improvement culture. The result is a more gratifying employee experience and higher levels of productivity. 

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Final thoughts

Total Quality Management has the potential to revolutionize a business’s output as well as how it evolves over time. By continuously striving to enrich the employee experience, companies can empower their staff and imbue them with a sense of responsibility that enables them to drive optimization organization-wide and bring ever-greater value to customers.

To sustain growth and success in the long term, employee empowerment is a must, and TQM is currently unrivaled in this regard. 

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2020 started with a lot of concern; individuals, businesses, and governments were all thrown into a state of confusion. COVID-19 ravaged the world and there was no known remedy.

2021, however, promises to be a year full of hope. Pfizer and its partner BioNTech have filed for emergency authorization in the US of their Covid-19 vaccine; the advanced trial showed the vaccine protects 94% of adults over 65.

With the view of a remedy at our reach, organizations will start strategizing for 2021. One thing we must learn to live with as a result of the pandemic is home working.

Most business will have to be conducted online as compared to before the pandemic. You will have to deal with the issue of more data that is going to be ferried from one spot to the other.

More than ever before, customer feedback will make a lot of difference in your products and services. You must consider the feelings and comments of your customers if you still want to be relevant and competitive in this “new” business landscape.

The business world is slowly getting used to big data; however, it is the source through which you get your data. One pertinent question you must be ready to answer is, do you have a strategy in place to enable you to gain useful insight into the data even when you have access to it?

Sentiment analysis using product review data

ResearchGate, in a study, revealed that more than 80% of Amazon product buyers trust online reviews in the same manner as word of mouth recommendations. There two channels through which you can get these online reviews: the first is review sites, while the second is social media.

While acquiring the data has been made easy, the data you get from these channels are, unfortunately, unstructured. To make any headway out of the data, you must put in several hours of human labor for structuring and analysis.

However, advancement in technology has made it relatively easy to deploy Natural Language Processing and machine learning into sentiment analysis using product review data. You can use several techniques and complex algorithms such as Linear Regression, Naive Bayes, and Support Vector Machines (SVM) are used to detect user sentiments such as sarcasm, context, and misapplied words.

When you use these techniques, the tool usually separates the reviews into positive, negative, or neutral tags. This will enable you to obtain the relevant insights within minutes.

The insights you have been able to obtain will indicate the needs of your customers and you can then use them for the following:

1. Discover what your customers like and dislike about your product or service

Sentiment analysis using product review data will not only reveal the feelings of your customers towards your product; you will also understand what they think about your current approach. From this, you will know what improvements you have to implement.

You will have a clear insight into your customers’ mindset and how they interact with each other about your brand. The insights you gain from these will enable you to send content that resonates deeply with your target audience.

2. Use your product reviews to know your status in the market.
   

Sentiments about your brand can shift radically and quickly, depending on what’s happening globally. For instance, the Cambridge Analytical Scandal was a big blow to Facebook; you can use sentiment analysis to appropriately monitor your brand’s status and focus on PR campaigns.

You will be able to shift and flex your efforts as quickly as the reviews.

3. Develop actionable strategies to improve deficiencies

How do you package your product, for instance? Do you believe it has to be bigger or smaller? Can you afford to increase the price, taking into consideration a situation like the COVID-19 pandemic?

When you listen to your customers, you will know the step to take to boost engagement, raise satisfaction, and convert more customers to your brand.

4. Boost customer conversion rate

While your effort must be geared at getting positive feedback, occasional negative feedback can also be useful. Since they are paying for your product or service, consider your customers as your most honest critics.

Their views are impactful and will help you to acquire new customers if you implement changes. Making adjustments based on insights from customer feedback will help you deliver better customer experiences, products, and services that will keep your customers coming back.

Once they are satisfied, they willingly spread the word to friends and family, bringing in new customers.

5. Obtain real-time product insights anytime

Feedback through sentiment analysis using product review data is effortless and quick. It can provide you with real-time updates about how customers adjust to any recent change you may make.

6. Improve service

The more you make positive changes to customer service, the more customers appreciate your gesture and become more loyal. To find out if these changes are necessary, you need to deploy aspect-based sentiment analysis. This will enable you to clinically dissect the problems that may or may not exist in your company.

Conclusion

It’s not just about having data; it’s about carrying out sentiment analysis using product review data. Sentiment analysis will give your brand the actual insight into the mindset of your customers.

Using the information in real-time enables your company to implement the necessary marketing strategies to become relevant and more competitive. You need to constantly watch and analyze the views of your customers because they can change their opinions quickly.

Customers can be erratic, but having a strategy in place that includes sentiment analysis in your digital marketing arsenal will go a long way to improve things.

Image Credit: shutterstock

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The trend in eCommerce has been driving quickly towards AI and Machine Learning. The onset of COVID-19 has accelerated this development for many companies. With a reduced workforce and many employees having to work at home, AI technology has been filling the gap and keeping eCommerce running at full speed.

We know the Big Four tech giants: Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are benefitting.

The big four love that we have the stay-at-home orders as more people shop from home and spend time watching movies and social media.

The Big Four are also increasing their use of AI and Machine Learning to streamline work and stay in contact with the customers with AI-powered consumer insights.

To stay ahead of the competition and to reach your potential customers more effectively, it is essential to integrate Machine Learning and AI technology into your eCommerce site.

Here are some powerful ways this technology can make a difference:

Chatbots

Chatbots have come a long way since they first appeared on websites.

They now can create a smooth, realistic experience that can make users feel as if they are conversing with a real person. Chatbots enable your company to keep in touch with present and potential customers any time, day or night.

These chatbots can get even smarter and personalized as time goes on, since thanks to AI, they can “remember” which kinds of replies worked well in the past and employ similar formats.

In addition, smart chatbots can make suggestions for new products based on past purchases and browsing habits of specific customers.

Product Descriptions

Take the tedium and expense out of writing product descriptions with the help of AI technology. Not only can you create descriptions, but AI technology can update listings instantly.

Revisions can be refined to what customers find useful and relevant according to consumer data. The technology can also pinpoint what listings are not working and how they can be tweaked to boost sales.

In addition, listings can be adjusted according to the region to appeal to different customers in the global marketplace.

CRM

Machine learning can make data collection for CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, automatic.

The old-fashioned way of doing things was to sift and work through customer data over a period of years, which can be incredibly time-consuming and expensive hiring people to do the work.

AI-enabled CRM can expedite and automate these data-collection tasks so your sales staff can add a personalized and human element to reaching out to customers and nurturing relationships.

Dealing with Reviews

Many customers will look at reviews before clicking a button to make a purchase. Most of them know that some of these reviews are fake, but an impression counts.

One strategy that has become notorious is some unscrupulous companies leave negative reviews about competitors.

It can be impossible to keep track of all of these fake and damaging reviews in time to deal with them — unless you have AI technology that can help determine real from fake reviews. Make sure you have positive, user-generated views reach the top of the list.

Voice Assistants

It began for most people with Alexa on Amazon, but pretty soon, nearly all eCommerce sites are likely to have voice assistants powered by AI technology.

The more finely-tuned the tech, the more useful your voice assistant will be for customers, and it may be able to “remember” what customers purchased in the past and make informed recommendations based on past data and changes in inventory.

Market learning can take algorithms and predictive analysis to determine what customers may find appealing and suggest items for them.

Inventory and sales management

Inventory can involve a lot of guesswork, particularly because it may be hard to predict future sales. To keep your business lean and profitable, sales forecasting is essential and involves predicting how many items you will sell in a certain amount of time.

AI and Big Data can prevent you from overbuying or understocking certain items and find the sweet spot that will make our inventory move smoothly.

Market learning can take past sales and new trends and help create forecasts that can inform merchandise buying decisions.

Taking demographics, weather, trends, and past consumer behavior into account, AI technology can help keep your inventory at the right level at all times and can update information instantly as the orders come in.

Incorporating Machine Learning and AI into the running of your eCommerce site and your marketing efforts can put you in the same league as some of the biggest companies, such as Facebook, Google, Coca-Cola, North Face, and thousands of others.

With the increase of the use of AI in the era of COVID-19, it is essential not to be left behind by competitors but reach your present and future customers through advanced techniques such as chatbots and voice assistants.

AI can also enable you to automate everyday activities and help your team focus its creativity and energy into fostering relationships with clients and customers and increasing sales.

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What is the future of travel? Probably, fundamentally similar to what was before COVID –although there will be new measures in place intended to screen passengers for the Coronavirus. Here are the new technologies in travel-tech that are here to stay post-COVID-19.

The body reverts to homeostasis, and the world will go back to some semblance of normal.

People want to travel–and they will. Leisure travel, we expect, will return, although estimates vary as to when travel will fully recover. While the road to full recovery may be a long and unprofitable slog for airlines, travel for leisure is embedded in our culture.

Tourism is an indispensable cornerstone of the global economy, and as such, people will return to the skies. Particularly helpful will be the treatment protocols against the Coronavirus and the global effort to develop a vaccine.

Countries with economies heavily dependent on tourism — such as Greece and Cyprus — have begun to gradually open their borders.

A trend has developed to gingerly open borders within travel corridors consisting of nations with low infection rates. Think the Baltic nations, for instance, and those in the Eastern Mediterranean consisting of Greece, Cyprus, and Israel.

Business Travel

The return of business travel is, too, inevitable, although the robustness of business travel moving forward is a matter of debate.

Digital Business

Traveling to London or New York for a meeting or conference may be diminished with the rapid adoption of tele-business conducted on video conferences.

Not only do online meetings save money for corporations during a recession, but they also absolve corporations of liabilities associated with sending employees on business trips in the wake of a pandemic.

The success of Zoom, however, bodes poorly for the profitability of airlines, for whom corporate travelers–more likely to book business-class seats — represent higher-margin customers.

Airlines

Airlines will need to be creative in how they attract and retain customers — and keep their businesses above water. For one, new artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies allow for faster collection of customer feedback.

Fast customer feedback can be used to personalize and more effectively disseminate price comparison and price drop alerts to potential travelers.

As the vast majority of travelers use the Internet to plan the bulk of their trip; web scraping technologies enable online booking agents to expand, review and monitor prices to offer the best package for their user.

The best packages will pose competition and opportunity for airlines. Web scraping enables airlines to track customers’ feedback and preferences. For now, incentives rule the day as airlines work to regain the trust of wary customers.

Before travel returns to its 2019 levels, consumers must feel safe on public transportation.

There is a widely-held public perception that planes are hotbeds for the spread of Covid-19. In recent decades planes have become more and more packed as airlines have attempted to squeeze as many passengers as possible on each flight.

While airlines have disputed this — any customer can tell you that the perception is reality. Travelers will opt for road trips if they don’t feel safe in flight. Airlines contend that their air filtration systems are top-notch. Their assurances haven’t convinced many travelers to return to routine travel.

During the dark days of March, when the pandemic shocked the world and the stock market was at its low, the TSA recorded a year-over-year decline in passenger travel as drastic as 96%.

Travel and Transportation

The robustness of air travel has improved, the numbers are still catastrophic when compared to pre-pandemic levels. Short-term, what may prevail is an affinity for private transportation, benefiting automobile manufacturers at the expense of airlines and other forms of public transportation.

After 9/11, travel was changed forever. The basic bargain was that passengers would sacrifice some convenience in exchange for extra security.

Here, too, passengers may be compelled to compromise on some convenience and expedience for the sake of safety protocols. Some airports have asked passengers to arrive four hours before their flights.

Airports have been using technology such as body-heat sensors so as to identify potential virus carriers. Temperature checks have become routine. Some airports — such as Vienna International — have implemented virus checks for all arriving passengers.

The virus check protocols pose a quandary for travelers who run the risk of being denied entry upon arrival.

Disinfecting public transportation presents challenges and opportunities. Companies — as well as public bodies such as New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority — will need to invest in antiviral technologies so as to regain the customers they lost to the pandemic.

The MTA, which operates New York City’s subway, has launched a program to use ultraviolet light as a means by which to disinfect subways and buses.

The lamps, purchased from Puro Lighting, a Denver-based startup, utilize a type of high-intensity UVC technology that the manufacturer says eliminates 99.9% of viruses and bacteria.

Scientists are still studying the efficacy of this technology although the MTA expects positive results.

Recently, the MTA shut down subways for four hours overnight so as to deep-clean subway cars and public spaces–anathema in a city that prides itself on its 24-hour culture.

Increased demand for technologies that deploy UV light to eradicate the Coronavirus presents opportunities for UV start-ups and manufacturers.

A particular conundrum relates to the viability of the airline business, which is facing a perfect storm of headwinds: a pandemic, a recession, a decrease in the need for business travel, and a need to overhaul operating protocols.

Airlines are not structured to maintain financial solvency through several consecutive months of massive declines in ridership.

While airlines in the United States have been criticized for investing in stock buybacks instead of rainy-day funds, few businesses could survive such massive declines in customer demand.

Government assistance in the United States as part of the CARES Act–as well as infusions of cash through the public markets–will sustain the airlines, only to a point.

Airlines have struggled to balance profitability with passenger accommodations. Some airlines have pledged, for now, to guarantee that middle seats in three-person rows will remain unbooked. Having the middle seat empty will maintain some semblance of the distance between passengers.

Frontier Airlines implemented a $39 fee to guarantee an empty middle seat, only to abandon those plans amidst public backlash.

It may be that, amidst a pandemic and deep recession, customers will demand concessions from airlines at no additional cost.

JetBlue was the first airline to require all passengers to wear masks during flights; virtually all other airlines followed suit. And airlines have begun to conduct temperature checks before passengers board planes.

All manner of solutions has been proposed, including whacky, whimsical-looking seats meant to enable quasi-isolation, as well as the introduction of transparent plastic hoods around each economy seat.

These proposals are unlikely to get off the ground. In reality, deep-cleaning and face masks may be the best executable solution.

The Internet-Business-Landscape

The Internet has changed the competitive landscape for those in the airline business — and has provided opportunities to effectively harvest data so as to improve customer retention.

Leveraging big data, for instance, has been used to maximize the utility and profits of frequent flyer programs. These programs have become indispensable tools for airlines to manage their customer communications and engender brand loyalty.

In the post-pandemic world, each customer is incredibly valuable–and frequent flyer programs will be utilized to entice customers to repeatedly patronize the same airline.

Loyalty and customer incentive programs have become anchors of the airline business; United Airlines recently mortgaged its frequent flyer program to raise $5 billion in much-needed cash.

New problems beckon new innovations, and in turn, those innovations give rise to new concerns.

In the fog of war — amidst the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak — companies and governments eager to return to work rushed to purchase technologies intended to detect carriers of the virus.

What ensued was a bonanza for the makers of thermal scanners–even if those devices were not intended for the purpose of checking a person’s temperature. It proved that much treasure was spent on ill-advised machines unable to accurately detect infections.

Technology will have to come up with robots and heat sensors designed for use on and by humans. Like the x-ray machines introduced after 9/11, these technologies may invite privacy concerns.

Further, it’s been reported that a statistically significant percentage of virus-carriers are asymptomatic, thus posing the question: is the implementation of temperature-checks.

Body heat-sensors intended to truly stymie the spread of the virus, or is the purpose more to assuage the worries of an anxious public?

The challenges ahead are great — and the road to solving them will no doubt be a long one.

Yet, as the old adage goes, one door closes — and another opens. There is an abundance of opportunities for those able to innovate.

Airlines will need to be creative in how they achieve profitability while ensuring customers that airplanes are safe to fly. Airlines will need to invest in new technologies to screen passengers and clean the interiors of airplanes while reducing costs.

Some hotels have begun to keep rooms empty for as long as 72 hours in-between guests.

While this isn’t realistic for airlines, passengers will likely encounter a new normal of travel: strict, staggered check-in times; self-check-in without the aid of staff; and further weight restrictions.

As airlines will have no choice but to invest in new technologies enabling them to fly in a post-pandemic world, they will in turn need to cut costs by downsizing their workforces and minimizing in-flight service.

Image Credit: shutterstock

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