Conclusion
Prove, protect and promote yourself
Prove yourself.
It’s important to understand your customers’ quality expectations. Do they expect fair trade? Ethical practices? Is it safer? More durable? Adopting tools such as a quality management system that supports reporting across these key value drivers not only improves your position with customers, but also competitors and investor communities too. Differentiate yourselves from your competitors by highlighting the value of your goods and services beyond the price. Highlight your quality management practices, safety record, the quality of your raw materials and ingredients and your commitment to customer satisfaction. Wear your badges with pride. Customer reviews alone may not provide consumers with enough assurance so think about what other sources you can share and promote to engender reassurance, such as adherence to recognised quality standards, regulated bodies and trade associations. Respected, formalised, recognised assurance increases consumer confidence in your products and services and could allow you to maintain a competitive advantage in the market. Demonstrate the multiple ways in which you seek to ensure quality and use data from your quality, health and safety, and ESG solutions to validate your claims.
Protect yourself.
The old adage “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is clearly not true. Reputation damage will hurt in the short term but can last for decades. Do all you can to avoid this happening to you. Invest in robust quality management systems, use technology to monitor processes and manage risk such as Ideagen Risk Management or Ideagen Quality Management.
Be prepared for a crisis. Hopefully that day won't come, but having a collaboration solution in place that enables you to react swiftly to a crisis and keep all stakeholders across your supply chain or ecosystem involved, will help protect your brand and hard earned reputation. A solution like Ideagen Huddle will give you a collaborative and compliant place to store and share crisis management plans, policies, processes and potential pre-modelled response content.
Similarly, Ideagen PleaseReview allows high volumes of stakeholders to come together and collaborate on developing policies procedures and incident response communications. With clear audit trails and the ability to review, edit and redact content throughout your ecosystem, senior leaders will be able to approve appropriate response communications reducing the amount of time spent in coordinating an event response and instead investing the time in addressing it.
Look for providers that can also offer learning management solutions to ensure your ongoing training needs are met and any training gaps are proactively identified to ensure standards are maintained.
Promote yourself.
In addition to being cost competitive, highlight your quality management practices, safety record, the quality of your raw materials and ingredients and your commitment to customer satisfaction. Safety and quality standards should not be underestimated. Put time and effort into achieving and promoting recognised assurance standards, such as Fairtrade or British Lion Quality to demonstrate your commitment to producing safe and high-quality products. Demonstrate that you extend your quality processes not only within your organisation but within your supply chain too. Effective supplier management and consistent onboarding processes within your supply chain help to avoid unwanted, unexpected challenges. Third-party validation of your quality management processes shows you aren't marking your own homework. Be confident that your processes stand up to rigorous scrutiny by validation experts such as Ideagen CompliancePath to demonstrate that your processes are stress tested, ready to roll out and scale up with confidence. Be a responsible and trustworthy business by using comprehensive solutions for managing quality, environmental health and safety risks. Partner with trusted solution providers to ensure your processes are always up to date and aligned with the latest best practices and standards.