Uptime.

Cost aside, why do people buy certain products over others? Why do you prefer to deal with some people over others? What are you striving for when you produce work? The answer to all of those questions is quality, which seems a harder concept to nail down than you think. A recent article by Seth Godin pointed out the confusion surrounding quality and looked at it from a manufacturing and a design view point.

I don't manufacture anything but I do produce, so I look at it from a personal view point in the way I go about getting to my end objective or piece of work and the needs to have a quality control about it. A factory that requires no end quality assurance guarantee has been set up with quality manufacturing and is so much cheaper to run than continually fixing something once it's built. This is the thinking people need to apply to anything they produce, rather than continually going back to the client and tweaking whatever they have delivered.

Phillip Crosby in his book from 25 years ago, "Quality is Free", figured out "why spend all this time finding and fixing and fighting when you could prevent the incident in the first place?" So back to the simple, deliver what you are say you will deliver and the quality of your work will not be questioned. The latest list of favourite quality brands in America showed how much easier it was to be a manufacturer like Mercedes Benz or Apple, with only a couple of service providers like Amazon in the top 20.

David VanAmburg, managing director of the ACSI, describes how much easier it is to actually make something. "Service industries tend to score lower on the Index than products. Products are far more reliable and easier to quality control than services, which more typically involve the variability of the human element. With the exception of Amazon, all the very best-scoring companies – the ones that get an 85 or greater – are manufacturers.”

From a design view point, your work has to have the insights and thoughts your clients are after so that they are delighted by the end result and become advocates for the quality of service you provide. Without harping on the fruit factory, Apple does this better than most and users become zealots about recommending the products. Sometimes the hardest part is getting to that nirvana of "zero defect" that manufacturers talk about and that service companies strive for but can never hope to achieve.

For a technology company that guarantees a 99.99% uptime, to increase incrementally and get to 100% uptime is going to cost a fortune, so instead they need to concentrate on how their people interact and work with their clients because that 99.99% means nothing if you can't deliver a quality service in face to face business. No one cares that the servers are always up if the service attitude is crap and your web interface sucks. No amount of PR regarding uptime will get around the lack of quality service from the staff.

The issue with quality is the concept is in the eye of the beholder, before purchasing, during purchase and after delivery. So for you to deliver quality work no matter what you do, you have to exceed expectations of your customers and maintain that standard over the life of that relationship. Difficult to do at the best of times, so why are you trying to please everyone when you can work with your advocates and supporters to produce quality. The more a product is diluted the more likely the quality is seen as reduced.

It costs 8 times the amount of revenue to get a new client as to keep an existing one, so why dilute your quality and chase rainbows without a pot of gold at the end. You are in command of your quality control and as Philip Crosby so aptly put it "Quality is free but it is not a gift".