Customer focus Quality is ‘meeting or exceeding the expectations of the customer’. Therefore
you need to find out what those expectations are and constantly monitor the
extent to which you are satisfying them. We have mentioned elsewhere that a
school has a variety of customers or ‘stakeholders’ – parents, pupils, employers,
government – and the importance of monitoring their expectations and our
satisfaction of these expectations cannot be overstated.
An irony about meeting or exceeding expectations is, of course, that any
improvement that we make rapidly becomes the new ‘norm’. Further
improvements will be looked for and any slipping back to the old standards
will create dissatisfaction. Furthermore, the direction and emphasis of
customer expectations will change.