Research shows that 55% of consumers will pay more for the guarantee of a good experience. This shows why both quality control and quality assurance measures are important.
But many businesses don’t know the difference between quality control vs quality assurance. To know which one your business needs to focus on more, it’s important to dive into what makes them different.
Understanding Quality Assurance
The main goal of quality assurance is to prevent bugs, issues, mistakes, and errors. Quality assurance is the proactive phase of quality management. It covers everything involving processes, strategies, and standards for a product or service.
Quality assurance or QA works to identify potential issues before they arise. QA uses methods like bug testing, setting requirements, and developing processes and workflows.
Quality assurance issues include bottlenecks in production or recurring bugs in a program. If your production process seems to run over deadlines, this is a quality assurance issue.
In short: quality assurance is about making sure things never become a problem in the first place. Failures of quality assurance result in defective products making it to the market.
Understanding Quality Control
Quality control is responsive rather than proactive. Quality control, also known as QC, is about correcting problems that already exist.
Quality control is the system your company uses to find and fix problems that arise in your end product. These systems and processes can include Operational Qualification or OQ test. There are also many other methods that identify where a given issue comes up in the user experience.
Unresolved bugs or problems in a piece of software are quality control issues. Long lag times between a bug report and a fix, and similar hiccups in the post-production pipeline. These issues can hamper customer satisfaction. This can lead to decreased demand for products or services due to bad experiences.
If these two aspects of quality management still sound very similar, it’s because they’re closely related. But there are key differences.
Quality Control vs Quality Assurance in Practical Terms
At the most basic level, the difference between QA and QC is whether the approach is proactive or reactive. The goal of quality assurance is to avoid problems happening in the first place. Quality control seeks to fix the problems that arise in a timely fashion.
Both QA and QC play major roles in maintaining customer satisfaction and building your customer base. It’s important to know which tasks should go to which team. You should also know how to implement processes to make both sides of the coin work best.
Quality Control and Assurance Boost Satisfaction
Make sure you identify quality management issues and know which issues are quality control vs quality assurance. By doing this, you can improve customer relations on all fronts, and increase your business’s bottom line.
Strengthen your quality management teams with the right tools and empower them to do their best work.
If you enjoyed this article, make sure to bookmark our website and check back often!
