What is CTQ?
CTQ stands for Critical to Quality and refers to the characteristics of a product or service that are crucial for meeting or exceeding customer needs and expectations. CTQ factors are the key parameters that have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and value creation.
Why is CTQ important?
Identifying and focusing on CTQ factors is important for several reasons:
- Customer-centricity: CTQ factors are based on the customer’s perspective and ensure that the company prioritises the aspects that are most important to them.
- Quality assurance: By managing and monitoring CTQ factors, the company can ensure consistent quality in its products and services.
- Effective resource allocation: Focusing on CTQ factors helps the company to direct its resources and improvement efforts where they will have the greatest effect on customer satisfaction and business results.
How to identify CTQ factors
A common tool for identifying CTQ factors is a CTQ tree. It is a hierarchical breakdown of customer needs and expectations into concrete and measurable quality characteristics. The steps for creating a CTQ tree are:
- Identify overall customer requirements: Start by understanding the customers’ overall needs, expectations, and desires.
- Break down the requirements into specific dimensions: Divide the overall requirements into more specific dimensions or categories, such as performance, usability, durability, etc.
- Identify measurable quality characteristics: For each dimension, identify the concrete and measurable characteristics that affect customer satisfaction. These are the CTQ factors.
- Set targets and limits for the CTQ factors: Define target values and acceptable limits for each CTQ factor, based on customer expectations and business goals.
By using CTQ trees, businesses can translate the Voice of the Customer (VoC) into concrete quality requirements that can be measured, managed, and improved. CTQ factors become a powerful tool for driving customer-centric quality development and creating value for both customers and the company.