Why do we assume that quality is expensive?

I was talking to a colleague recently, and began discussing some of the transformation work that I had undertaken to help improve customer service at a local authority. (See my blog entry here.)

Not for the first time, an assumption was very quickly made that an improvement to service, and a dramatic reduction in the time taken to complete the customers’ demand, would increase the cost of the service.

Anyone having read and followed some of Deming’s work, will have come across his Chain Reaction:

For a given task, operation, business or purpose, taking the effort to get it right first time every time, reduces cost because there are fewer mistakes, less re-work and less chasing.  As in my example in a recent posting, for half of all demand, we managed to design out the need for customers to call chasing us up on progress, and eliminating the wasteful hand-offs and re-work.

Who’d have thought – get it right first time, and it reduces total cost…