This work by Matthew I. LeVeque is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
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Product & Service Quality of Internet Marketing
August 18, 2007 |
While continuing my focus on quality and process improvement tools as they apply to Online Marketing I recently came across the attached working paper. Besides being a rather long title, “The Application of Six Sigma Improvement Process on Enhancements of Product Quality and Service Quality of Internet Marketing” by S.C Chen takes a thorough look at applying customer satisfaction requirements to both the manufacturing and marketing of a product or service online. Below is an abstract of this working paper:
Abstract Internet marketing is believed to have many advantages over traditional marketing, such as limitless time and boundless distance, low cost and home delivery, and therefore has become another trend of marketing nowadays.It success is determined critically in two aspects: product quality and service quality. Product quality refers to the customer’s acceptability of product’s Research and Development (R&D) and manufacturing at the backstage while service quality means the customer’s acceptability of product’s marketing and maintenance at the proscenium. Most research on customer’s satisfaction on Internet-marketing generally limits itself within product quality and service quality and analyzes and improves customer’s satisfaction through one single aspect. Such method is not able to find critical causal categories on customers’ whole acceptability. Therefore, this study used Six Sigma MAIC (measure, analyze, improve and control) to ameliorate procedure and meanwhile considered product quality and service quality of Internet-marketing in order to establish a system to enhance customer’s whole satisfaction.
Although this paper is very detailed, it is really only useful for an in-house Online Marketing team since you need to have 100% control over the product or service from start to finish (manufacturing to marketing). If you are an agency type and want to apply some of the ideas from this paper, focusing on the service research is your best bet.
The other question I would raise is that the authors only use the “M-A-I-C” phases of DMAIC for their research. There is some truth in that early on in the Six Sigma era that ‘MAIC’ was the way of the world until Ruth Frattori added the ‘Define’ phase in DMAIC during her time at GE Capital. Her claim was that ‘without D, you didn’t know where to start1‘.
Keep in mind that when you are planning a process improvement project, having a clearly defined problem that needs to be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled is the critical first step.
1 Rath & Strong (2003). “Rath & Strong’s Six Sigma Leadership Handbook”. Starting with the Customer: An Interview with Ruth Frattori, pp. 186-95
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