Celebrating World Quality Day 2019

At Guildhawk, we pride ourselves on delivering quality as a matter of course. So we couldn’t let World Quality Day – 14 November 2019 – pass without acknowledging the part this annual landmark plays in highlighting the importance of sustaining and improving the highest standards of professional service across the board.

World Quality Day is an initiative of the Chartered Quality Institute (previously the Institute of Quality Assurance), which began life in 1919 in the UK and is now a global trailblazer for promoting quality in business practice.

This centenary year is not only a major milestone in the Institute’s history, but also provides the perfect platform to celebrate the heritage and evolution of the quality management discipline.

Most people would assume quality to be a non-negotiable aspect of any professional exchange. However, as Guildhawk’s Head of Quality Standards, I know from experience that the concept of “quality” is not always easily defined or properly understood.

Happily, the ISO Standards have helped to establish a universal benchmark, enabling conscientious organisations such as ourselves to adopt an approach to quality that moves beyond vague theoretical concepts and delivers practical, tangible results.

We hold various ISO certifications that guarantee the standard of our workmanship and provide our customers with complete peace of mind. Just to take one example, ISO 9001 certifies that an organisation’s quality management systems conform to relevant statutory and regulatory requirements, enhance customer satisfaction and address risk management, among other provisos.

Thus, our ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System certification underpins our commitment to provide a reliable language service, deliver fast and accurate content at a fair price, and never compromise on quality or deadlines.

In practice, we implement the ISO framework internally in a variety of ways, each separate element combining to provide, as a whole, the cutting-edge customer satisfaction on which we have built our reputation.

Our strategy encompasses every sector of our operation, from evaluating our linguists for subject matter expertise, onboarding and training them for specific projects, through guaranteeing turnaround times and assuring robust quality control, to safeguarding the security and confidentiality of sensitive data.

By adhering to the stringent standards of the ISO, we can in turn ensure our own in-house systems are fully comprehensive, consistent and futureproofed.

For example, our bespoke quality policy on performance evaluation requires regular reporting on key business parameters, internal audits, annual staff appraisals and individual development plans, complaint management procedures, and customer feedback evaluation processes – and that’s just one small section of the overall quality control structure.

Part of Guildhawk’s mission is to help our clients maximise opportunity and mitigate risk by reducing the cultural and communication distance between businesses and their markets. By prudently investing in the improvement and development of our quality management system, we are perfectly positioned to deliver value added services, demonstrate continuous progress and exceed customer expectations.

Quality is an asset that can never be taken for granted – but on World Quality Day, the Guildhawk team are proud to hold our heads high and be counted.