Quality via satellite: interactive communications technology is bringing TQM experts and small businesses together - total quality management seminars and information via electronic feed in Sioux Center, Iowa - includes information on U.S. Chamber of Commerce seminars via satellite

Nation's Business, Dec, 1993 by Michael Barrier

In a small town like Sioux Center, Iowa, on a beautiful day in the fall, you can begin to understand what may grow out of the increasingly rapid and fluid exchange of information that is such an important part of late-20th-century America.

Sioux Center is a picture-perfect Midwestern town of 5,000 in the northwestern corner of the state; the casual visitor would be hard-pressed to find a house in need of a coat of paint. The area's economy is overwhelmingly agricultural--corn grows just a stone's throw from Sioux Center's grandest houses-- but the town has an industrial park that is home to out-of-state and even foreign manufacturers.

Employers are drawn to Sioux Center by its work ethic. "We have a real problem with employment," says Verlyn Rozeboom, president of the Sioux Center Chamber of Commerce. "Our unemployment rate is so low that there aren't enough people around for the jobs available."

Over the past couple of years, Sioux Center has seen a burgeoning interest in the principles of Total Quality Management. "There are a lot of businesses in Sioux Center that have what most people would call a 'quality program,'" Rozeboom says, even though those firms haven't yet framed their programs in formal TQM terms. Rozeboom is vice president of Sioux Automation Center, a 70-employee company that makes agricultural equipment, and, he says, "customer service is what built our business."

So far, Link Manufacturing, Ltd., a 60-employee firm that makes components for the heavy-truck industry, is the only local company that has moved into full-scale TQM. It has given six hours of training in TQM techniques to both managers and employees, has shifted to partnership with its suppliers, and, most recently, invited employees to criticize company operations, says Dennis Michels, the general manager. "We've really changed how we look at business."

Link will probably not be alone much longer. Through interactive satellite technology, business people in Sioux Center-- and hundreds of other small towns--are hearing experts on quality management in live presentations from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in Washington, D.C., and asking them questions.

Link is sending three or four of its employees to each of the 10 satellite seminars in a series on quality management that the U.S. Chamber's Quality Learning Services division is offering this fall. The Sioux Center Chamber's "industrial action team" is sponsoring the seminars locally. For each seminar, four or five dozen local business people gather in the basement of the Sioux Center public library, watching the presentations on television sets lent by local stores.

Michels says that the seminars have in effect confirmed the value of what Link is doing. "You need a little validation that you're on the right road," he says. "I think we can benefit a lot from [the seminars] because it's not the first time we're hearing this." But small-business owners who are not so familiar with quality principles may benefit even more.

For example, JESCO Wholesale Electrical Supplies, a family-owned firm, has about 45 employees at five locations in Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota. The company, according to its president, John M. Franken, is one of those small businesses that is getting just big enough that it should start moving from "natural" quality management to a more structured kind, and so, he says, "I'm trying to glean what I can."

Franken and two of his salesmen attended a recent seminar On "Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty." In the satellite program, Christopher Fay, a vice president of the Juran Institute, a quality-management consulting firm, led an hourlong presentation that illuminated the critical differences between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Loyalty, Fay pointed out, is what small businesses really want, because a customer may be satisfied and yet not come back. In a second hour, Fay and a panel of experts took fax and telephone questions from sites all over the country.

"We've been worried about customer service," Franken says, "and doing written surveys," which Fay described in the seminar as no substitute for face-to-face or telephone questioning of former customers as a way of getting at the real reasons for "disloyalty."

Franken has also been doing things consistent with Fay's recommendations, though; he just hasn't been doing them in the structured, systematic way that will become necessary as his business grows larger. He says, for instance, that when a manager at one of JESCO's branches lets him know that a customer wants to close an account, he calls that customer himself to find out what the problem is. "It works well for me because I haven't known the guy personally," he says. "I find that they really open up. All but one, we've gotten their business back."

Christopher Fay contends, however, that getting former customers back shouldn't be the principal purpose of such calls; they should instead be a way of pinpointing weaknesses that may displease the customers a business still has. And, in fact, Franken keeps a sort of diary of customers' complaints, to look for patterns: "If I see a pattern, I need to get all the managers in to talk about this."