It is no secret that proving the quality of intangible business services is incredibly difficult compared with tangible products.
This is probably because many people think ‘seeing is believing’, and as services are experienced by the business with few tangible elements to show for their purchase, customers are naturally more cautious.
Righttrack Consultancy, a learning and development specialist with over 20 years experience, conduct annual surveys targeting their customers to find out their thoughts on what really matters when selecting a training provider. Unsurprisingly the quality of the training scored very highly, with a 4.78 out of 5 score. This is not new information, however it does illustrate that proving quality within the learning and development industry is crucial for success.
To help organisations prove their level of quality, a series of quality certifications have been developed by the International Organisation of Standardisation (ISO). The certifications assess an organisation’s processes and procedures against a benchmark level of quality. In 1987, the ISO 9000 accreditations were developed by ISO and have since become a popular way of proving quality for many organisations in a vast range of sectors.
Therefore, Righttrack, whose clients include Gucci, Mercedes Benz and The Home Office, decided to work towards becoming ISO certified to strengthen their already well-established reputation of being a quality learning and development provider. In September 2007, Righttrack achieved this and now hold both the ISO 9001 Certification as well as the ISO 14001 Environmental Certification, one of only a few training companies to do so.
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Mike Cooney, Director at Righttrack, said, “We felt that gaining the ISO certifications were a valuable investment, as it proves our quality practices are more than doing their job. This has always been an important objective throughout our history and with the ISO quality certificates it gives our quality a tangible element.”
To date many learning and development companies have yet to join the trend in gaining certifications by quality assurance bodies compared with other industries. In the training sector, quality will always be one of the determining success factors and so proving your quality will always be important, particularly in the face of ever-increasing competition.
