Quality metrics are measurements that are used to evaluate the value and performance of products, services, and processes. These metrics can be used to identify areas for improvement and to ensure that products and services meet the needs and expectations of customers and stakeholders. Quality metrics may include measurements of functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction, among others. By tracking and analyzing quality metrics, organizations can improve the quality of their products and services and better meet the needs of their customers. The following are common examples.

Customer Satisfaction
In many cases, it is appropriate to measure the quality of a product or service by the quantifying customer opinions. The most common way to do this is simply to ask customers to rate their satisfaction. For example, there is no better way to measure the quality of a meal beyond asking the customer if it was good.

Ratings
Ratings of products and services such as those offered by reputation systems.

Failure Rate
The reliability of products as measured by the probability of a failure over a period of time. For example, a robot might have an annual failure rate of 0.1% indicating that 1 out of 1000 units fail in a year.

Mean Time Between Failures
The reliability of IT services is often measured as the mean time between failures. For example, a software service with a mean time between failures of 6 months is down twice a year on average.

Quality of Service
Quality of service is a telecom industry term for the quality of network services such as internet connectivity measured using technical metrics such as error rates, bit rate, throughput, transmission delay and availability.

Quality Control
Quality control is the sampling or testing of manufactured units or delivered services. For example, a hotel might randomly sample rooms that have been cleaned to make sure that the room is in the expected condition. This can then be tracked as a quality metric such as the percentage of rooms that met the hotel’s standards.

Defect Rate
The quality of processes or project work can be measured with a defect rate. For example, the number of defects per 1000 lines of code can be considered a quality metric.

Time to volume is a marketing metric that measures the time it takes for a new product to go from concept to launch and reach a significant level of sales or usage. Also possibly used as time to scale. It is similar to the time to market metric, which measures the average time it takes for products, services, and innovations to go from concept to launch. However, time to volume is intended to exclude limited launches that only reach a small number of customers, as well as products that never achieve a significant level of commercial success. The definition of commercial relevance may vary depending on the size of the organization, but it typically refers to revenue, units sold, transactions, or number of service subscribers. By tracking time to volume, organizations can measure the efficiency and effectiveness of their product development and launch processes.

An impact evaluation is a study that measures the actual outcomes and consequences of a change. It takes into account both intended and unintended effects of the change, and aims to determine its overall impact. This means that a program or project may achieve its goals, but have negative unintended consequences. On the other hand, a program that is perceived as a failure due to budget and schedule issues may actually have a more positive impact than originally anticipated by its planners. Impact evaluations help organizations understand the full range of impacts of a change and can inform decision-making about future changes or interventions. The following are illustrative examples of an impact evaluation.

Cities

A city expands its highway system to more lanes only to discover that within a few short years traffic jams have once again become a common occurrence. An impact study indicates that the new lanes encouraged development of land further from the downtown core making the city less dense and increasing average commuting distance.

Transportation

A program to develop a system of high speed trains is initially viewed as a failure as it exceeds planned budget. However, within a decade ridership is far greater than business plans had anticipated. The overall impact on the economy, quality of life and the environment can be demonstrated to be exceedingly positive.

Education

An education system abandons standardized testing in high schools in favor of tests crafted by individual teachers. A later impact study looked at data before and after to determine that grade inflation occurred with the abandonment of the standard tests. This led universities and colleges to begin to rank schools and apply more complex admission processes than were far less transparent to students.

Marketing

A newspaper begins aggressively optimizing the titles of its articles with A/B testing. This immediately increases overall revenue. A later impact study indicates that the quality of titles dropped dramatically such that titles often didn’t reflect the content of articles. The optimization effort was associated with a steady decline in reputation, customer satisfaction and subscription rates.