ask the customer

Based on our research work with best-practice teams we've developed a 5-step voice-of-the-customer, or VOC process for aligning customer requirements with product requirements in order to determine what customers value most. The customers requirements are their wants and the product requirements are how you will fulfill those wants with your product or service.

This process permits the development team to focus the creation of a new product on what customers actually want and deliver it when they want it. The prioritization of customer and product requirements focuses finite resources where they can add the greatest value--this focus accelerates development cycle-time.

If all else fails ask the customer seems obvious, but in our experience, actually asking the customer what they want is rare, especially in the technology business. Rather, we hear technologists say, they dont know what they want until we show it to themthis is leading edge stuff and so on There is a reason 9 out of 10 new products fail could this be one of them?

Five-steps to getting VOC

What they say they want is the listening part,
what they mean and intend is your translation of what they said,
what this means to us is your conversion of their wants into a product definition,
what we will produce is the physical or digital manifestation of these requirements,
and finally what they say when they see the solution is your demonstration of the product to confirm it is what they wanted.

The process is iterative and can occur many times during the development cycle. Best practice teams continually confirm the products value using this process throughout the development life cycle.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• voice-of-the-customer
• voc
• fastworks