Consistency versus Quality?

I read through a discussion thread where participants were debating the trade-off of consistency and quality in customer service. Ultimately, I decided not to participate, as it seemed the two sides were well-entrenched and not really listening to one another - but it is an interesting dilemma:

Primarily, my sense is that the very topic is misconceived: consistency and quality are not opposites. Consistency and customization are opposites, and the question is which one of them better accomplishes the goal of providing quality service.

There's also the problem of staying on that goal. The advocates of consistency seemed to be distracted by a conflicting agenda: operational efficiency. I don't think there's much ground for argument as to whether operational efficiency is best served by consistency or inconsistency - the former is the hands-down winner. You use exactly the same materials and perform exactly the same actions to produce exact replicas of the same products, and the only variable you cannot control or foresee is volume of demand.

However, operational efficiency is not the same as customer service - and it's a separate argument as to whether customer service should be compromised to provide greater operational efficiency. And in that sense, service becomes the hands-down winner: there is little point in being highly efficient at providing a product that is undesirable or an experience customers find unpleasant.

That's not to say things are necessarily so: the best possible situation for a firm is being highly efficient at providing a product that is desirable and an experience that is pleasant. There's no reason that could not be possible, though it tends not to be so.

The problem is that customers are people, each of whom is to some degree an individual with idiosyncratic needs and desires. And as such, there are not many situations where the exact same product or customer experience is preferable to all. Even when you sort them into groups by vague and high-level criteria (market segmentation by any other name) the idiosyncrasies persist.

The degree to which customers will be willing to compromise their needs to accept a consistent (but not quite comfortable) fit with a product is also decreasing. Cam Marston's research into generational tastes and preferences suggests that this waxes and wanes: the older demographic groups are often willing to compromise, being from an era where there weren't a lot of choices and conformity was a social value, the younger are more demanding and come from an era where their individual rights and needs are respected. I don't see that changing.

However, it's not a matter of evolution or the choice of one extreme to the exclusion of the other. Even the younger demographics who expect service providers to serve their individual needs expect some consistency: while they demand that a product or service to be tailored to their specific needs (customized) they also expect it to be the same (for them) every time (consistency).

Ultimately, I don't see a clear winner in the debate, or that such an argument can be won on theoretical grounds. The competition is in the arena of the market, the weapon is research, the judges are the customers, the reward is profit, and the stake is sustainability.