Taking Action eNewsletter

Have You Heard The Voice of Your Customer?

Issue Twenty-Eight

The objective of a Voice of the Customer study (VOC) is to transform customer’s unstructured expressions of needs, wants and desires into a set of defined and prioritized requirements for an organization’s products and services.

Executing VOC begins by identifying and prioritizing customers and market segments. Once target customer groups have been defined, a plan to interview a representative sample of customers is developed. A set of open-ended questions is designed specifically to elicit responses of need, want and desire, and can be presented to customers in a variety of ways; face-to-face, by phone, or in focus groups. For this round of interviews, direct contact with the customer is superior to an impersonal approach, such as a web survey.

Customer responses are analyzed to extract key drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty, known as Critical-to-Quality elements (CTQ’s). A follow-up survey is then designed for customers to rate their satisfaction with the organization’s current level of performance (by CTQ) and the relative importance of each CTQ to their overall expectation of performance. This follow-up survey can be presented to a broader audience of customers and the personal interaction is less critical, so a web survey is very effective in this instance. Customer ratings can be plotted on a grid with current performance on one axis (low to high), and importance on the other (high to low), so that CTQs of high importance and low performance can be illustrated and recognized at a glance.

A VOC enables an organization to develop a strategy of market intervention to address the high importance/low performance CTQs. This customer derived, focused input into strategic planning is essential to any improvement initiative. The customer’s perception of progress towards the objectives associated with the market intervention strategy are then measured by continued administration of the satisfaction portion of the web survey deployed in the VOC. Additionally, the organization will learn valuable information about their customers, particularly in the examination of the customer comments collected in the open-ended questions stage of VOC. Hidden in these comments are often priceless expressions of unmet needs.

We recently conducted a VOC for a financial services client. At the conclusion of the VOC, the client was delivered a set of defined and prioritized CTQs that constitute the objectives for a strategic improvement initiative to improve customer loyalty. A baseline Net Promoter Score was established, along with customer ratings of importance and performance in 12 key aspects related to their products and services. The questions developed for their VOC will be reviewed periodically with their clients to gauge improvement as objectives are realized from the improvement plan derived from the VOC.

For more information about VOC and unmet customer needs, see this article in MIT Sloan Management Review by Anthony Ulwick and Lance Bettencourt:

Giving Customers a Fair Hearing

Your comments about this issue of Taking Action and your suggestions for future issues of Taking Action are always appreciated. My email address is: doug@thedougwilliamsgroup.com