The Voice
of the Customer
Quality can
be defined as meeting customer needs and providing superior value. Meeting
customer needs requires that those needs be understood. The Voice of the
Customer is the term to describe the stated and unstated customer needs or
requirements.
Up to a few
years ago, when companies wanted to know what their customers were thinking,
they just asked. It sounds simple enough, but it was anything but. Companies
painstakingly pulled together a large random sampling of their customers and
then overwhelmed them with dozens of questions about anything they could cram
into a half-hour telephone survey. They mailed out questionnaires they hoped
customers would fill out and return. They brought a handful of customers
together for focus group sessions that could last several hours. Then along
came the internet, and companies embraced email and the web to poll their
customers without incurring high phone or postage costs.
In any
case, collecting customer feedback was a massive undertaking that few companies
did more than once a year and response rates were typically very low. Survey
fatigue was rampant, mostly because surveys were not customer-friendly: They
were absurdly long and structured with the company's interests and not the customer's
in mind.
Today,
those outdated methods are too slow and infrequent and don't go nearly deep
enough to keep up with modern business pressures.
That's why
companies today are turning to Voice of the Customer (VOC) solutions.
The Voice
of the customer is a term used in business and Information Technology to
describe the in-depth process of capturing a customer's expectations,
preferences and aversions. Specifically, the Voice of the Customer is a market
research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs,
organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of
relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives. Voice of the
Customer studies typically consist of both qualitative and quantitative
research steps. They are generally conducted at the start of any new product,
process, or service design initiative in order to better understand the
customer’s wants and needs, and as the key input for new product definition.
Much has
been written about this process, and there are many possible ways to gather the
information like focus groups, individual interviews, contextual inquiry,
ethnographic techniques, etc. But all involve a series of structured in-depth
interviews, which focus on the customers’ experiences with current products or
alternatives within the category under consideration. Needs statements are then
extracted, organized into a more usable hierarchy, and then prioritized by the
customers.
It is
critical that the product development core team own and are highly involved in
this process. They must be the ones who take the lead in defining the topic,
designing the sample, generating the questions for the discussion guide, either
conducting or observing and analyzing the interviews, and extracting and
processing the needs statements.
Voice of
the Customer Initiatives
- A detailed
understanding of the customer’s requirements
- A common
language for the team going forward
- Key input
for the setting of appropriate design specifications for the new product or
service
- A highly
useful springboard for product innovation.
Qualities
of Desirable Voice of Customer Metrics
Credibility:
How widely accepted is the measure? Does it have a good track record of
results? Is it based on a scientifically and academically rigorous methodology?
Will management trust it? Is there proof that it is tied to financial results?
Reliability:
Is it a consistent standard that can be applied across the customer lifecycle
and multiple channels?
Precision:
Is it specific enough to provide insight? Does it use multiple related
questions to deliver greater accuracy and insight?
Accuracy:
Is the measurement right? Is it representative of the entire customer base, or
just an outspoken minority? Do the questions capture self-reported importance
or can they derive importance based on what customers say? Does it have an
acceptable margin of error and realistic sample sizes?
Actionability:
Does it provide any insight into what can be done to encourage customers to be
loyal and to purchase? Does it prioritize improvements according to
biggest impacts?
Ability to
Predict: Can it project the future behaviors of the customer based on their
satisfaction?
