In the Six Sigma world, we give a lot of lip service to the importance of the customer; we even have an official name for it—voice of the customer, or VOC. The problem is that many businesses don’t really have a good system for giving the customer what they ask for, much less one for listening to what they say. If you have been into a retail store recently, you may wonder if anyone has a good system for that. So what should a good customer quality assurance (CQA) system look like?

Let’s begin by defining customer quality assurance, because misunderstanding what it is can contribute to messing it up.

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