Driving Superior Consumer-Led Quality

The increasing volume of consumer feedback across digital platforms presents both challenges and opportunities for companies. Now more than ever, quality teams must listen to and harness this feedback to drive growth by prioritising consumer-led product quality and design.

Consumers increasingly rely on peer opinions and online reviews to guide their purchasing decisions, making it crucial for companies to address negative feedback promptly to safeguard brand equity and commercial performance. As a result, there is mounting pressure on companies to deliver products free from defects and failures, meeting the increasingly high expectations of consumers.

Despite the challenges posed by this digital scrutiny, the vast digital footprint also offers an invaluable opportunity to gain deep insights into consumer pain points and product concerns. By systematically gathering and analysing quality-related consumer feedback across digital channels and integrating it with internal data sources, quality teams can develop a comprehensive understanding of consumer perceptions related to product quality. This understanding empowers them to drive growth by developing superior products that truly meet consumer needs and expectations.

While some quality functions have begun analysing consumer feedback on an ad-hoc basis, few have fully integrated consumer listening capabilities into their operations across markets and categories. Incorporating these data sources effectively allows quality teams to become more responsive to incidents, launch more consumer-centric improvement initiatives, and drive innovation across the organisation.

Historically, companies relied mostly on traditional methods, such as surveys and focus groups, to gauge consumer perceptions of product quality and the impact on purchasing decisions, as well as brand loyalty. Whilst these methods provide a point-in-time snapshot, they often lack authenticity, are quickly out-dated and are difficult to scale across a broad set of SKUs and markets.

In today’s digital world, quality teams can tap into an entirely new data ecosystem, offering insights with better granularity, higher frequency and broader coverage across product portfolios and markets. This ecosystem includes internal complaint and customer care channels, as well as publicly available data, such as social networks, e-commerce sites and specialised forums. Due to their nature and characteristics, each source provides a unique perspective into consumer opinions, and quality functions must leverage both internal and external data for a holistic understanding of how consumers perceive their products.

The potential of external data sources is often overlooked by quality teams, who typically focus on traditional quality metrics like Complaints-Per-Million-Units (CPMU). While these metrics offer a baseline of quality performance, they tend to exclude a large part of a company’s consumer base and often lack the rich qualitative insight that is required to drive consumer-led improvement initiatives. External data sources also allow quality teams to benchmark their products against competitors.

Additionally, quality teams should strive to enrich consumer feedback data with information about internal processes, such as Product Master Data and production plans, to create a direct link between consumers and operations. This enables granular insights which help to optimise quality performance for factories, third-party manufacturers and suppliers.

Consumer feedback can be leveraged in many ways to deliver tangible benefits within quality contexts. Analysing this feedback enables quality functions to shift from reactive incident management to proactive consumer listening and response strategies. This shortens feedback loops between the manufacturer and the consumer, allowing a more consumer-led prioritisation of continuous improvement initiatives. At the same time, real-time consumer insights help detect marketplace incidents swiftly, minimising the scale of recalls and corrective actions, thereby protecting consumers and upholding brand reputation.

Within each use case, quality teams can investigate a broad range of relevant and actionable topics – including issues with leakage, irregularities in smell and taste, damaged packaging and missing product components to name a few relevant to CPGs.

The usage and application of holistic consumer feedback can lead to a step-change for quality teams. There are three key steps to realising the full potential of consumer data.

1. Define a clear role for consumer insights within Quality

   Every quality organisation can benefit from analysing consumer data in different ways, depending on their unique context. If consumer listening initiatives and the needs of quality users (as well as the wider quality strategy) are misaligned, it can fall short of expectations and fail to deliver the intended benefits. To avoid this scenario, it is crucial to align on the business questions and decisions that need to be informed or enhanced by consumer feedback. Establishing this view must be a collaborative effort amongst quality leaders as well as analytics experts, whose role it is to evaluate the feasibility and to create a roadmap which outlines a clear path to achieve the ambition.

   Given the transformative nature of consumer listening initiatives, it is critical to bring the entire quality team along on the journey. Therefore, it is advisable to start every consumer listening initiative with a narrow set of test markets to the evaluate the feasibility, generate excitement amongst the quality community, and as a result, de-risk the transformation. In these early stages, it is important to quickly demonstrate value and build trust in the approach amongst future users and stakeholders. Such early successes, alongside a strong endorsement and sponsorship from the quality leadership, are the foundations of a successful consumer listening transformation.

2. Leverage advanced analytics and Machine Learning for scalability and sustainability

   To truly incorporate consumer feedback into daily operations, quality teams must move beyond proof-of-concepts and ad-hoc initiatives, and instead aim to provide an ongoing stream of consumer data and insights at the point of decision making. An impactful consumer listening capability should capture, transform, analyse and visualise hundreds of thousands of data points as they become available. Given consumer feedback usually comes in an unstructured text format, often in various languages, it must be organised into a framework that is both understandable and actionable for quality users. To conduct this process on an ongoing basis, manual efforts need to be minimised and a high degree of automation must be achieved.

   Developing such a complex consumer listening capability requires a strong partnership between the quality function and technology and analytics functions. These teams should make use of advanced analytics and Machine Learning (ML) methods, including various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, which can significantly accelerate the steps required and transform large volumes of data into actionable insights. Methods such as Entity Detection, Topic Categorisation and Sentiment Analysis are at the core of every scalable consumer listening capability.

3. Create action protocols and consumer decision forums

   Building a powerful listening capability alone is not enough to unlock the full benefits of consumer data. A common pitfall of quality teams is to focus entirely on developing their consumer listening capabilities without consideration of how it will be embedded into the ways of working and how it will help to drive decisions. This lack of clarity can lead to low adoption levels amongst users and, ultimately, become a barrier to realising the intended benefits. Quality teams must therefore introduce an appropriate level of guidelines that govern the usage of the capability and provide structure to users.

   Consumer listening capabilities typically trigger two types of actions and decisions: immediate, ad-hoc actions and planned, reoccurring decisions. Ad-hoc actions tend to be triggered by alerts and emerging high-risk incidents which required immediate corrective action, while planned decisions usually revolve around understanding overall trends in consumer feedback and pain points, with the aim to inform improvement and innovation initiatives.

   For ad-hoc actions, it is essential to define the metrics to monitor and to establish the thresholds for further investigation / corrective action. In addition, clear responsibilities for actions and step-by-step protocols must be laid out and communicated to the user base prior to launching consumer listening capabilities. For planned decisions that need to be informed by consumer feedback, quality teams can either enhance existing meetings or create entirely new decision forums, aimed at driving actions based on quality-related insights.

Regardless of the use case or type of decision, the clearer the structure and guidance provided around the usage of consumer listening capabilities, the easier it will be to achieve wide adoption, measure impact and realise the full benefits of these capabilities.

Holistic consumer feedback, from internal and external sources, has the potential to redefine how quality teams measure performance and allows them to become a force for consumer-centric improvement and innovation, ultimately, establishing Quality as a key pillar for sustained growth. A clear vision for the role of consumer feedback within Quality, along with advanced analytics, cross-functional collaboration, and defined ways of working, are the foundations for driving superior product quality and design.