What this book covers

Chapter 1, Solving Problems and Driving Value with VoC, We explore a short history of new product development and why many projects fail. We discuss why customer input is so important to the product development process and what it means to be customer focused. We also begin to define what is meant by VoC.

Chapter 2, VoC in the Product Development Process, We look at where VoC fits in the product development process and the major types of new products. We review the typical stage–gate process in new product development and how VoC can influence or drive each stage.

Chapter 3, Laying the Groundwork, We discuss some of the methods and tools to help understand your customers and markets. In this chapter, we review SWOT, Porter's five-force model, the BCG growth share matrix, customer segmentation, and competitive analysis.

Chapter 4, Gathering the Customer Needs for Your Product, We conduct a review of different methods and processes to gather customer feedback and insight. Methods discussed include surveys, interviews, focus groups, lead user analysis, and ethnography. In addition to an introduction of each method, we present the benefits and shortcomings of each approach.

Chapter 5, The Interview Process – Preparation, Here, we go through how to organize your VoC program, focusing on creating a plan, selecting your customers to interview, defining how many customers to interview, where to do the interviews, who will do the interviews, scheduling the interviews, and creating the interview guide.

Chapter 6, The Interview Process – The Interview, We discuss methods to collect customer information during the VoC interview, roles and responsibilities for each member of the interview team, practicing the interview before you meet the first customer, things to avoid in the interview, and ways to get the unspoken word through observational interviews.

Chapter 7, Understanding the Customer's Voice, We explore processing the customer data acquired during the VoC sessions to sort, prioritize, and translate the customer input into product requirements.

Chapter 8, Validating the Customer's Voice, We look at determining how the input received from the VoC can drive customer decisions in order to delight the customer, using tools such as Kano Analysis to help prioritize product features and finding out how to assign value to each of the perceived benefits the features bring.

Chapter 9, Completing the Circle – Using the Customer's Voice in Your Organization, We'll discover how to use the data generated from VoC to create actionable attributes and requirements for your product, and how to document these requirements into language the rest of the organization can use to create your new product using QFD. Once the product is defined, we discuss how to market it, assign value to its features, and price it so as to maximize profitability. Lastly, we create a value proposition for your product.