Voice of the Customer (VOC)

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Customer Insights: New Product Development Orientation

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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Customer Insights: New Product Development Orientation

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This course is the first in the Customer Insights and New Product Development (CIPD) specialization. It will introduce learners to the tools and process of gathering customer insights for identifying and developing new product opportunities. Through an integrated set of five modules and hands-on project experiences, learners will acquire the knowledge and skills to turn their ideas gained from understanding customer needs into innovative new products.

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MODULE 3: Identifying the Voice of Your Customer

This module will provide a conceptual overview of the voice of the customer method for identifying customer needs and expectations for a product or service. This module emphasizes the use of active and passive methods of observing customer behaviors.

Identifying Customer Needs through Lead Users13:31

Voice of the Customer (VOC)12:38

House of Quality13:53

Rencontrer les enseignants

William Qualls
Professor Emeritus of Marketing
Business Administration, Gies College of Business

In this module, we will continue to identify ways in which you can

identify customer needs and translate those needs into a valuable product concept.

One technique that has been used extensively through

both consumer durables as well as

consumer goods products is called the voice of the customer.

When we say the voice of the customer,

the objective is to identify customer needs through the customer voice,

not through what we perceive those needs to be.

Customer needs are the output of your interactions with your customer.

And you can obtain these needs in a number of different ways;

by observing the end users,

talking to the end users,

looking at competing products that are already available,

or even interviewing the customer about the product.

Our objective is to identify a laundry list of needs so that we can begin to

prioritize those needs with

respect to the target market in products that we've developed.

There are several questions you want to ask when you're conducting

a voice of the customer analysis.

Remember you can do this either through observation or you can do this

through actually asking the customer to relay their experiences with the product.

But primarily, the key question is,

what is the customer's problems or what are the needs that will help solve that problem?

Starting at that particular point,

that will give you a way of focusing your questions on a particular problem,

and you may do this in an intuitive fashion.

Once you identify one problem and that need,

you may move to a secondary problem or a tertiary problem.

The next question is,

how will the product or service that you're

developing solve the customer problems or customer needs?

So this gets you to think about what are

the technical need requirements that you will

need to address those problems that a customer has.

Now, once you've identified the laundry list to customer needs,

you want to be able to specify the customer needs that will

satisfy or excite the customer in terms of the problem that they have.

And that may differ depending upon the target market.

So you really want to focus those question to a specific target market and maybe do

multiple voice of the customer analysis if you're targeting multiple markets.

Now, once you have their laundry list,

you need to prioritize those needs and determine what's

most important to the customer for making their buying decision.

And then, the final question that you have is,

how many customers should you interview?

So, research has been done to identify

some heuristics or rule of thumbs regarding the number of respondents or groups,

and your objective is to identify as many needs as possible,

but you might begin earlier then you'd find 100%.

Very seldomly, you'll identify 100% of customer needs,

even when the use lead user analysis,

even when you're talking to a specific customer.

So, you have to determine what level

of response that you want in terms of the needs you've identified.

So this is just a comparison of two different techniques.

The circles is when you conduct one-on-one interview.

So you're talking individually with the customers,

and you're trying to get them to relay their experience,

other problems that they're having,

and uncover those needs through that dialogue.

Alternatively, you could use the orange square,

which are focus groups,

to help determine the needs.

And some people think that in a focus group,

where you have multiple people responding,

will be able to identify more needs that when you're talking to an individual.

But this research by Griffing analysis suggests that over time,

if you're identifying the right questions that you ask,

you can almost match the number of

questions and the number of needs identified with the focus group.

So if we look at this graph and say that we want to identify 80 percent of the needs.

At 80 percent, you will have to interview at least five groups.

But for individuals, you will have to identify at least seven individual.

So you had to determine between all those techniques,

which is more efficient and cost effective for you,

as to whether you target individual customers as your respondents,

or gather together individuals in a group.

And this is based upon the amount of time that you'll spent with each of these.

So if it's a one-on-one interview with seven people identified,

it would be approximately seven hours to collect that information.

But with the focus group,

which takes approximately two hours to conduct,

you'll need only five groups,

but that's a total of 10 hours.

So, over time, the individual responses gets you as many needs as a focus group,

but you don't have as many different people in that focus group.

So you have to decide which is the best approach for you.

Now, subsequently on, we'll talk specifically about

how to conduct a one-on-one survey interviews,

a one-on-one personal interviews,

and we'll also talk about focus groups.

But this just gives you an idea of the trade offs

between two technique trying to identify customer needs.

So, once you've identified these customer needs through the varieties of customers,

the next step is to begin to help prioritize those in need.

But before you can do that,

you have to translate the customer needs into what we call a customer needs statement,

something that gives you detail on not how to solve the problem,

but what the problem is.

So there's five steps to this process.

First, you want to focus and develop questions that tell you what,

but not necessarily how.

You're going to use a different technique to determine the how.

You want to be as specific as possible as it relates to the what.

So, what are the customer needs have,

but what specifically are they talking about.

It's better to state this as positive terms and

not negative terms because positive terms will lead to a more viable product concept.

You want to be able to identify the attribute or

the benefit of the product or service

that you're developing as it relates to the customer needs.

Avoid terms such as must and should.

This is kind of an open mind approach to identifying customer needs.

And at this particular point,

you don't want to limit the needs until you have a customer actually prioritize.

So, it must ensure to entails to focus your efforts on only those needs.

So, more detail about this particular process.

What do we mean by what not how?

So, what not how.

Let's say that the customer's statement is,

"Why don't you put a protective covering around the bottom of the backpack?"

So the customers identified that they need

the backpack to be more protective from damage,

from rain, from dropping,

whatever they may use the product for.

The wrong way of translating the need is to state the how.

The back is covered by a plastic sheet.

Remember we want to keep our minds open.

So, by restating that in a more positive way,

the bottom of the backpack is secured by a protective covering,

you haven't limited yourself to a particular technology or set of material.

You may find that there are other materials that will

provide better protection and more durability over time.

So you want to focus on the what, not the how.

Whereas the secondary needs statement focuses on the how,

the last needs statement focuses on the what.

Next step would be specificity.

So the customer says,

"I drop my backpack all the time."

So this is a general type of need,

but it reflects on how the customer use their product.

The wrong way of stating that would be,

the backpack has to be rugged.

The more positive needs statement would be

that the backpack protects content whenever dropped.

So, then this don't have to be a rugged type design,

but it has to be a design that protects the ingredients of that particular backpack.

That could be in the material,

that could be in reinforcement into certain parts of the backpack.

It could be in the combination of materials [inaudible].

But the more specific that you can translate the customer's statement to,

the more likely you identify a need that can be translated into a product concept.

The attribute or the benefit of the product.

So the customer say, "I'd like to charge my phone from my backpack."

Or it could be their laptops or it could be other device.

The wrong way of saying it would be,

a backpack charger adapter can charge any phone.

That limits you to only phone battery charging techniques.

A more appropriate way is,

the phone battery can be charged from a backpack charging station or even better,

any electrical item can be charged from a backpack charging station.

That will include laptops,

PDAs, and all your phones.

The next would be the actual avoiding of must and should.

So the customer states,

"I hate it when I don't know how much juice is left in the portable chargers."

So, the wrong way of stating this is,

the backpack should provide an indication of the energy level of the portable charger.

So, the right way maybe reformulating that need statement is that,

the backpack provides an early warning that your battery is about to become inefficient.

So, that's a more general statement,

and it may refer to the number of hours left in it or minutes left in it,

but that early warning system suggests to the user that they need to find a way of

recharging the battery without necessarily have to be specific about the energy low.

So the last thing we want to do would

be to make sure that any of the statements that we've identified earlier,

we identify in a more positive rather than negative.

So if the customer says, "It doesn't matter if it's raining,

I still need my backpack to protect its contents."

The wrong way of saying that is,

the backpack contents are not affected by the rain.

A better way of saying that is that the backpack

protects the contents in all types of weather.

So that more positive approach may widen up how you would address,

not just an issue of rain and not just in terms of it's not affected by,

but the fact you've increase the benefit to having a more positive benefit state.

Otherwise, since we've been talking about backpacks,

let's look at this in terms of an example.

These are several different examples of backpacks or case.

Some was based upon color,

some was based on style.

There's different pockets all the way to the standard briefcase.

Using these backpacks as an example,

you will have an exercise that will get you to identify and

translate the customer statement needs

into actual user needs that will be using in the product concept.

So this exercise will be explaining various set of exercise.

And if you are able to complete the exercise,

we will then see how you can identify and translate

customer needs using the voice of the customer technique.

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