Defining VoC

While all input from customers should be considered important to the business, I think it is an important exercise to describe what VoC is, and is not. VoC is not:

• A sales call
• An executive meeting with the customer
• A discussion at a tradeshow
• A random customer survey
• A customer satisfaction score
• Heresy from the sales team
• Golf meeting with the customer

The process of identifying customer needs and requirements must be a disciplined and repeatable one. This is where many companies go wrong. Organizations that go down this path with no tools or metrics, and a consistent philosophy for collecting, analyzing, and incorporating customer feedback into products, will ultimately waste their time and will abandon future VoC initiatives.

Wikipedia defines Voice of the Customer as a market research technique that produces a set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives. While this is an acceptable definition, Gerald Katz, in The PDMA Toolbook, perhaps offers a more complete view of Voice. Mr. Katz writes that Voice of the Customer is:

• A complete set of customer wants and needs
• Expressed in the customer's own language
• Organized the way the customer thinks about, uses, and interacts with the product or service
• Prioritized by the customer in terms of both importance and performance

When we talk about a complete set of customer wants and needs, we are referring to any number of wants, needs, and desires, not just what the customer verbalizes. We are also referring to the way the customer uses and interacts with your product and competitive products, the benefits or lack of benefits your product brings, and the unarticulated set of problem solutions that could be had if only the customer had the right product.

There is a desire on the part of developers and even product managers to translate the customer speak into their own industry or company jargon. When doing this, the possibility of unintended manipulation or misrepresentation increases dramatically. The best alternative is to maintain the customers' vernacular as much as possible and preferably use direct quotes to illustrate the customer flavor and intent whenever and wherever possible.

When defining needs from customers, it is too easy to rank the ones you deem the most valuable higher based on your knowledge of the industry or your background. Don't fall into this trap. If you genuinely wish to understand the customer's voice, have them group the needs and rank those needs into primary, secondary, and tertiary buckets, and have them prioritize the needs statements you've developed by importance (or any other variable that resonates with the customer) so you can truly understand which ones the customer is most concerned about (and most willing to pay for).

Being customer-focused

Much has been written about the customers being at the center of the business or the importance of being customer driven, and many companies have undertaken initiatives to become more customer focused. Many say that their most important job is satisfying the customer, but there is a large disconnect between the way senior managers think they are customer-centric versus the reality of how their customers actually rate them. Furthermore, the question remains that if you are only satisfying the customer, is this really enough to stop a customer from leaving for another product or company that could delight them?

Companies, whether it is through senior managers, product managers, or engineering managers, often think they know the markets and exactly what customers need. This can present a psychological barrier to unearthing the true customer needs, and often clouds the actual customer input they do receive. To become a true customer-centric organization, these barriers must be broken down and the organization must become a learning organization and invite the customer into the product development process.

The biggest factor in product launch failure to realize potential and meet the needs of the market is poor product definition. Although the best companies appear to spend more time with customers and conduct more in-depth market and customer analysis, the average time companies spend in the field is, on average, seven days. Seven days! While 70% of the product life cycle costs are determined during the product development phase, seven days is clearly not enough time to guarantee product launch success.

Companies can also fall into the converse trap of listening to their current customers and ignoring the larger market. These customer-driven organizations are actually current customer-driven organizations. Often, current customers represent a very small fraction of the total market. They tend to have different market problems than your non-customers and view the world through the eyes of your product, focusing only on incremental improvements to the way your current product performs.

Eventually, companies fall victim to taking small incremental steps to tweak features in the current offerings (because that's what the customers told them they needed) instead of taking the initiative to create new products and solutions that could solve the broader market's needs and frequently, the needs of their current customers as well. If you are only listening to the few, those that you currently do business with, you will end up creating a narrowly focused product to satisfy the needs of an ever shrinking market as the rest of the world is evolving. Eventually, you will lose many of these same customers as they migrate to the new and improved solutions offered by someone else.

Based on a number of studies, not only does a strong customer focus improve product success and profitability, it can also reduce the time to market. Market analysis and research does not add extra time, but rather it pays off with higher success rates and better time to market. Fully defining a product before engineering forces a company to commit their resources, which in turn helps the project stay on schedule, achieves better time utilization, and reduces the amount of scope creep and change of product specification. Most importantly, it is the best way to meet the needs of the market.

Customer knowledge

An additional issue that can occur is a direct result of differing pockets of knowledge. Multiple organizations within the company tend to have a differing view of the needs of the customer. Senior managers, product managers, and engineering all have a view of the customer based on their interactions and history. Unfortunately, without direct customer input, they are nothing more than opinions and hyperbole.

Based on these customer understandings, someone or some group will suggest an idea for a product and infer it would be something customers would likely desire. The idea may have come from a sales meeting, a trade show, an executive meeting, as a reaction to a competitive offering, or it could be a technology-driven product from the company's own R&D group. The likelihood is that the product will have limited success with such a narrow view of the market.

There are, however, exceptions. It has been reported, but also contested, that much of Apple's success was solely due to the vision of Steve Jobs. Whether one accepts the premise that Steve Jobs was the innovative force behind most of Apple's innovations, or whether Apple has leveraged robust customer research and traditional VoC, one thing is certain. They understood the customer and were very tuned into the needs of the marketplace, both present and future. And while Steve Jobs may have been the driving force behind most of the successful products Apple has released in the last 20 years, I would argue that there are not many Steve Jobs in this world, and few have the insights into the mind of the customer that he had.

Although one would naturally think that doing market analysis and making the necessary product decisions before launching into full-scale product development would be almost second nature to companies both large and small, most products still fail to build into the product development process, the necessary steps that will ensure that customer needs are addressed before product development begins. In a recent study, fewer than half of the development teams thoroughly understood the user's needs at the start of a full-scale development, and the primary cause of major feature changes was reported to be the late discovery of customer requirements.