Businesses these days spend typically significant amounts of money on quality assurance, especially for those in the tech sector – just one significant product issue can be enough to be a significant detriment to a company’s reputation for years to come, even if they had produced rock-solid products until that point.
One critical strategy that can often be overlooked by larger organisations: using their own solutions for their infrastructure and business operations, ensuring that all employees are familiar with the nuances of the solutions their company offers, both positive and negative.
SMEs and startups would be more familiar with this approach, but in this article, I’d like to offer some additional nuances for consideration by tapping onto Synology’s own experiences.
The use of this strategy has definitely paid dividends for the company in the form of customer accolades. The Synology brand has topped PCMag’s Readers’ Choice Award every year in the home network-attached storage (NAS) category since it was added in 2012, with customers lauding our reliability and fantastic customer service. The same publication has also awarded us top honours in its Business Choice Awards.
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We’ve identified a few key takeaways that we feel were critical in our success:
Take time to understand how your products fit into your own business
One of the biggest factors in our quality assurance success is our commitment to using our own products for almost all of our business’s IT infrastructure, allowing the organisation to collect feedback from all of our workforce – from IT to HR.
Aside from quality assurance, one huge added benefit is that our sales, marketing and support teams are very familiar with the company’s products since they’re using those solutions on a daily basis.
This might seem like a basic first step, but does require the investment of time and resources to conduct an intense scrutiny of an organisation’s infrastructure and processes, from both business and operational leaders. This might even spark some additional ideas about how your products could be further refined to better fit into businesses.
For example, to name just a few, we use our products for the following critical business functions: storage for virtual machines; Active Backup for Business; collaboration and messaging; surveillance; and disaster recovery.
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Proactively foster a culture of openness towards constructive feedback
A company’s products are often a labour of love from its employees, and this emotional investment might result in them being resistant to feedback, whether it be from customers or from their colleagues.
The organisation’s leaders will need to be proactive in fostering a culture where employees are receptive to criticism, and where feedback is valued and seen as an essential part of helping the company and its solutions succeed.
From the R&D team to department heads, we ensure that all employees understand the importance of actively addressing feedback and that this is seen to be a priority from the management. Our own efforts in this regard are perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the anecdote that the company’s Chairman spends a couple of hours every day reading through user comments and enquiries.
Develop clear lines of communications
Of course, it’s also important to ensure that customers and internal staff are able to share their comments easily. Aside from emails, our teams also visit end customers from time to time to get them to share their comments and address any issues they might have, allowing our team to gather feedback directly from the ground; we find that this also helps to encourage our users to share thoughts that they may not have penned in written feedback.
Similarly, our employees are encouraged to use email or internal messaging platforms to share feedback freely, both when they have positive experiences and whenever issues arise.
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Develop SOPs to ensure all feedback is addressed
In using our own products, our R&D team is able to examine how our products function in real-world scenarios, allowing them to quickly identify issues and possible improvements, accelerating our development process.
Another possible point of failure for many businesses is that feedback can be lost down a black hole, where internal teams can decide to prioritise what they themselves deem to be important rather than addressing actionable feedback.
Going back to what I mentioned earlier, all feedback is also read by the management so that they are aware of any issues that they might need to direct their team’s attention to. We also collect and log all of such feedback for internal reference.
Don’t lose sight of the competition
One potential drawback to using only your company’s own products is that your team’s vision of the competitive landscape can become quite insular, owing to a lack of experience with the solutions offered by your competitors.
The management, therefore, needs to ensure that the team proactively keeps itself up to date on the latest news and products on the market through thorough market research; in this era of information overload, the difficulty is not in finding the information, but rather in ensuring that the team avoids complacency and keeps an eye on the competition to ensure that their own products are always a step ahead.
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