Voice of the Customer Process
The Voice of the Customer Process Flow: Listening to your customer’s needs on a daily basis can radically improve your organization’s success. Listening to your customers is a universal business mantra. You still have companies though who either don’t execute it properly or just don’t do it. You certainly have one off cases where entrepreneurs have stated that they never listened to their customers. Next they released a product which just blew the market away.
These are once in a while occasions because normally you of to listen to your customer’s wants and needs. It’s more important now to make this as a common business practice if you haven’t already. Certain markets are now being saturated with competitors and these competitors are often a click away.
The voices of the customer process are strategies you can use to gather useful customer insights in order to improve upon your product. You can perform this process when your planning to create a new product in your market. You can also implement this strategy when you’re going to push out an updated version of your product on to the market as well. When you’re launching a new product it can be pretty risky and statistically most new products fail.
The voice of the customer is not the Holy Grail but it will definitely reduce some of the risk your company is going to face when releasing a product and increase its success rate. You have a lot of voice of the customer strategies you can use to get useful customer insights. These include interviews, customer surveys, focus groups and ethnographic techniques.
All those methods can be really effective but they can also be ineffective if they are not conducted properly. Typically the process of voice of the customer process varies by organization and product. They are all aiming for the same outcome which is to get valuable information.
Below you can see a simple layout of an interview and focus group process. Keep in mind that the product development team must play a very important role in all the processes. They are the ones who are going to benefit most from the information. It will definitely help them to make important decisions that will benefit the product.
Voice of the customer process: Interview and Focus Group Process
Interview
Step 1: Conduct the Interviews
You are going to design and conduct the interview. It’s all up to you on how many customers you want to interview. Interview customers from different segments in your market. This will allow you to get different perspectives on what they are expecting from your product. Another tip you can do is to interview potential customers. These are customers who are not interested in your product but probably will if you can organize your product properly.
Step 2: Analyze Interview Data
Analyze all the information that you have gathered over the past few weeks or months. This process can take a lot of time but it can be done. If you get the right help from your peers it will certainly make things much easier. Make certain that the data that you have gathered is aligned with your goal. You don’t want to waste your time on irrelevant information that doesn’t have any substance.
Focus Groups
Step 1: Conduct the Focus Group
In a focus group you are going to let your customers test your product. This will help you to see the different body language and facial expressions they have when interacting with your product. Next you are going to ask them important questions which you can use to get valuable information from them about the product. You can even give them on spot surveys which is also another useful strategy you can use to get information.
Step 2: Analyze the Focus Group Data
Gather around your team to discuss the information that you’ve found. The focus groups information tends to be easier for analysis. Most of what you are going to do is asking them open Questions and get on spot answers.
Review and Implement Ideas
After everything is finished and analyzed you are then going to prioritize your ideas. Rank them from most important to not so important. You are going to implement the most important ones that will have a huge impact on your product first. Then try to build new ideas with the least important ones to make them more effective.
Quality Management and Quality Control Template, QC SPC Charts and Quality Tools
In summary, the voice of the customer process is a useful strategy you can use to get valuable customer view points on your product. This information can then be analyzed to help you develop additional ideas. That can be implemented in your product to make it better.