The Voice of the Customer is a process used to capture the requirements or feedback from the customer (internal or external) to provide them with a service or product that meets their articulated needs[1. References: Birkinshaw, Julian, John Bessant, and Rick Delbridge. “Finding, Forming and Performing: Creating Networks for Discontinuous Innovation.” California Management Review, Spring 2007, pp. 67-84.
Harrington, Richard J., and Anthony K. Tjan. “Transforming Strategy One Customer At a Time.” Harvard Business Review, March 2008, pp. 62-72.
Nambisan, Satish, and Priya Nambisan. “How to Profit From a Better Virtual Customer Environment.” MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2008, pp. 53-61.
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Zaltman, Gerald. How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market. Harvard Business School Press, 2003.].
This assumes that the customer know what they want and need. Of course, this is not always true, so this common tool used in Process Improvement has limitations.
This process is all about responsiveness and constantly innovating to capture the changing requirements of the customers over time.
The Voice of the Customer is the term used to describe the stated and unstated needs or requirements of the customer. The Voice of the Customer can be captured in a variety of ways: Direct discussion or interviews, surveys, focus groups, customer specifications, observation, warranty data, field reports, complaint logs, etc.
This data is used to identify the quality attributes needed for a supplied component or material to incorporate in the process or product. The VOC is critical for an organization to:
- Decide what products and services to offer
- Identify critical features and specifications for those products and services
- Decide where to focus improvement efforts
- Obtain a baseline measure of customer satisfaction against which improvement will be measured
- Identify key drivers of customer satisfaction
The following is a list of typical outputs of the VOC process. Check out the video further explaining Voice of the Customer and how to translate VOC to Critical to Quality Requirements:
- A list of customers and customer segments
- Identification of relevant reactive and proactive sources of data
- Verbal or numerical data that identify customer needs
- Defined Critical-To-Quality requirements (CTQs)
- Specifications for each CTQ requirement
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