subject: Avoiding Costly Mistakes In Business [print this page] When you start making errors, start shipping out product that should have been caught before it left the doors of the factory, you're in big trouble. When the bad product makes it out into the marketplace and into the customer's hands, it takes a long time to build that trust between the product and the customer again. Look at the recent recalls from the major Japanese auto makers.
When Toyota first started to see the problems, they jumped on getting them fixed, and because the times that these sorts of problems happened to the automaker, customers were forgiving and accepted the offers to have the parts fixed. But once it was discovered that the auto giant knew of the problems earlier than they led on, and didn't start fixing or taking them serious for longer than the customers were allowed to believe, the customers began to be a little less forgiving.
And because some of the customers felt this way and felt like they were deceived by the automaker, they began to look for alternatives for future purchases. Toyota failed to lose their entire customer base or even a large portion of it, but every customer that they lost and every loyal customer that's now buying an alternative car is a great loss. It took a long time for these import car manufacturers to gain the reputation as high quality products, and it only takes a short time for all of that hard work to be thrown out of the window.
Toyota is a brand that's synonymous with quality and if they made a mistake that could cause customers to second guess their decision to buy one of their cars, then any company can lose customers on the basis of selling inferior products. Now, there are some companies and manufacturers that make a living on selling these second rates, inferior products, but the customer knows that going in to one of the dollar stores that sells their goods.
The customer doesn't expect that kind of inferior product when they are buying a full priced item from a reputable seller, and if that's the kind of product you're making, you certainly do not want it sold in discount outlets. But quality doesn't always come cheap, but it can be made cheaper if you take into account all of the areas that you're wasting money and find a better way to do them.
