Are You Hearing Voices?
by Karen Roberts
Posted on 16 Jan 2019
If you’re not hearing voices, you’d better be! The voices you should be hearing are those of your customers. Organizations that are excelling in today’s economy are investing resources to make sure they are collecting the Voice of their Customer’s (VOC) in order to provide products and services that are causing wild excitement in the marketplace. We’re not just talking about “ho hum” “me too” products or services, we’re talking about “WOW, how did they know I can’t live without this!”
The VOC defines the direction that an organization should be taking. Collecting the VOC should occur throughout the product or service development cycle. It should take place before a final concept is defined, before development, and after a product or service has been launched.
We will be discussing one of the most effective ways to gather the VOC, the customer focus group. You’ll learn the secrets that customer savvy marketing companies charge your organization mega-bucks for. We will also be delving into how to create just the right questions to ask in the focus group, how to “scrub subjective customer input” and then how to determine product or service measures using QFD to ensure your getting your customers excited. Interested? You should be. It’s your turn to create unabashed passion in the marketplace for your products and services.
Assumptions
In a perfect world, a team of six to eight company employees follow the product/service development process from cradle to grave, guided by a facilitator. It has been our experience organizations that follow this formula learn the most and realize the best results. For the purpose of this paper, we’re going to assume that this is a perfect world. Our dream team would include two representatives from marketing, engineering/R&D, manufacturing and quality control.
Creating Questions
Before we talk the mechanics of gathering the customer needs, we need to cover how to find out what we want to know from the customer. This involves identifying categories of questions, writing questions and then going over the questions until you’re satisfied that you’re getting the information that you need.
Creating this list of questions will usually take longer than anticipated. One of the best ways to determine what questions to ask is to start by determining what categories the questions fall into. Ask the team to brainstorm silently on sticky notes, writing one to two-word statements on a category of questions they’d like to learn more about from their customers. Members post the notes on a wall and then begin rearranging sticky notes into meaningful categories.
From the groups of categories, sub-teams begin the arduous task of creating questions. Members receive basic training in “the best way to structure a question” and then go to work on creating a list of sixty to seventy questions. Questions begin very broad based, “describe, what tell me” and then drill down for specific information.
Next, it’s time to whittle the list of seventy questions to twelve to fifteen questions. This can take some time, but it’s very doable. The team now has fifteen perfect questions and it’s time to role play the questions with team members and anyone within grabbing distance. A rewrite on the questions takes place and then the team is ready for their first focus group.
If for some reason, the team is having trouble coming up with just the right questions the list below is a good starting point.
1. In what ways does our product or service perform well?
2. What aspects of the product or service do not perform well?
3. What are the best features of our product/service?
4. What aspects of our product or service would you strongly recommend we NOT change?
5. When using our product or service what defects would cause you to segregate or scrap the product?
6. What are the top 2 to 3 issues that are important to you?
7. In what areas do competitors perform better than our product/service?
8. What aspects of our product/service cause difficulty in processing?
9. What situations do you find awkward or difficult when purchasing our product or service?
10. Describe an ideal technical support experience and how do we compare?
11. In what areas can we improve the relationship between our company and your organization?
14. Given limited resources, which of the competitor’s products or services do you prefer and why.
12. If you had a magic wand, what would you change about our product or service and our support?
13. Looking into the future, how do you see your needs evolving?
The Focus Group
Focus groups do not have to be complicated and expensive endeavors. The trick is to capture “what” the customer needs with enough detail to determine “how” you’re going to meet that need. You don’t want the customer to give you a product or service design solution. Engineers, research & development employees and technicians in your organization should determine the design solutions. If you think you’re hearing solutions, ask the customer, “What will having that do for you?” Document that response. Actually, document everything the customer is saying. If customers will allow you to video tape the focus group without interrupting the flow of information, do it! You don’t want to interrupt the flow of information, but all information is important. Audio taping is less of an obstruction and can prove invaluable for questions the team may have regarding a discussion or the criteria used for making a decision.
The time it takes to pre-plan a focus group is usually six to eight weeks. The field sales employees will be primarily responsible for getting your customers to participate. Focus groups can be done at the client’s location and this is where you’d most like to be as team members. Being at the client’s facility affords the team the opportunity to take a tour of the facility and gather even more data. This provides first hand environmental information about how the customer uses your product or service.
The steps involved are:
- Choose customers who represent those that love you and those that hate you. Customers who are the most critical of your product or service can sometimes give you the best feedback. Contact them and send contact letter with a confidentiality agreement.
- Get a customer roster ahead of time and gather information on each participant’s position in the organization and their area of expertise.
- Create a customer presentation. The team will also need to put together an overview letting the customers know what you’re doing.
- The presentation should contain:
- Why you’re doing what you’re doing
- The focus group questions
- The evaluation criteria you will be using and a clear example of the evaluation criteria
- Conduct the focus group session. This is typically done with team members and a professional focus group facilitator. If not all team members can attend, the most technical team members need to be in attendance.
How to Conduct a Focus Group
A typical session, hosting four to eight customers, can take up to four hours. This includes introducing the session, asking the questions, scrubbing the data, and then asking the customers to rate needs and the competition.
Customers rate their needs according to:
1. How important each need is,
2. How well your organization is doing in meeting the need
3. How well the competition is doing in meeting the need.
The room set-up you see below is optimized for interaction. Team members should intermix with customers to build rapport with the customer. The main focus group facilitator presents the session overview. The data scrubber asks the questions, drills down to needs and not solutions, analyzes the data, and scribes each customer need on to a sticky note. She hands the “scrubbed” sticky notes to the data recorder, usually someone from the team. The data recorder is checking the sticky data note for technical competency and enters it into a spreadsheet.
The questioning period will take up to two hours. After all the questions have been asked and customer needs documented, the customers are asked to take a break or, better yet, go to lunch. This is when the team members go to work looking at each customer need, making sure there are no duplicates. There will also be group data that is expressing the same need in two or three different ways. This process can take the three person team about forty-five minutes to complete and load into a spreadsheet.
When the customers come back from their break, the data projector is projecting a form similar to the one below. One at a time, customers are first asked to rate the importance for each need. The rating of one indicates low importance from 1 – 5 (5 = critical, 1 = not as critical). Then, they are asked to rate how well your organization is doing in meeting their needs and how well the competition is doing in meeting the need. This is also done on a scale from 1 – 5 (5 = great, 1 = not so well).
Organizing the Data
It’s time to “scrub” the data and begin grouping like needs so that you can come up with a final list of 25 – 30 customer needs. In order to get a final rating on the importance of each need, you may need to resurvey customers or if you’ve taken enough data points, take the mode of the rating.
If you’ve only done one focus group and had a good representation of customers, you have all the numeric data you need. If you don’t feel you got a good enough sample, conduct a validation analysis on the customer’s needs and their ratings. Abby and Griffin tell us that to get 70 – 75% of needs we only need to talk to twelve customers. To get 80 – 85% of the needs, talk to twenty customers and to get 90% of the customer’s needs, interview thirty customers.
The “House of Quality”
The methodology that proves to be most powerful in analyzing the customer’s needs is QFD. The first matrix in a QFD project begins with the House of Quality. The House of Quality involves looking at the “whats” vs. the “hows.” The House of Quality is a matrix that the data is entered into. The team moves through each room in the House of Quality in a logical manner. There are a few absolutes in how the data goes into the matrix.
They are:
1. The customer needs, “whats” and their importance rating go into the matrix first,
2. The “hows”, the technical descriptors are created next, and finally
3. Team member’s ratings of the strength of the relationship between the “hows” and the “whats.”
Room #1 is where customer needs and their importance are documented. The importance ratings for the customer’s needs are critical. This one number drives the entire prioritization process. Using an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) will create a more robust final rating for the customer needs. If you’re doing multiple focus groups, it’s necessary to do a final Rating Analysis Survey using a format similar to the one below to get a final rating. These simple surveys can be faxed, mailed or sent via e-mail to customers. If your industry allows it, give the customer some sort of remuneration for completing and returning the survey.
The “hows” or technical descriptors are documented in room #2. Technical descriptors sometimes have various names like: product/service specifications, measures, Voice of the Engineer, quality characteristics, to name a few. For each customer need the team must determine a way to measure the need and then ask the question, “If we control this technical descriptor, will it help to meet the customer’s need?” If the answer is “yes,” a determination of the strength of that positive impact is determined. Strength relationships are strong (9), medium (3), weak (1) or none at all.
Room #4 holds the customer’s opinion of how well your organization is doing in meeting each need and how well the competition is doing in meeting the need. This general area of the House of Quality can hold numerous other rooms giving the marketing department something to crow about or the team something to delve into deeper.
The overall importance rating for each technical descriptor is documented in room #5. Knowing which technical aspect of the product or service is most important, give the team a road map for moving into concept selection. As the team moves into the final room in the House of Quality, knowing which technical descriptors are most important can help to expedite the analysis process. They may decide to only look at how the top third technical descriptors impact each other. Technical descriptors with low importance don’t need this type of in-depth analysis.
The “roof”, or room # 6, is called the correlation matrix. Completing the correlation matrix allows the team to understand which technical descriptors are impacting each other, either negatively or positively. Negative relationships that will cause the most trouble as you begin to design and build your product or service.
You’ve now concluded the process for gathering the VOC and putting it into a format that will tell your team in no uncertain terms, which aspects of the product/service are most critical. You should have a good understanding of the marketplace through the eyes of your customer, which is invaluable! There should be no question as to what to work on first and where to spend your resources.
Summary
Customer needs are constantly changing, the market changes and so does the competition. Using old customer input to build a new product or service would be like using an abacus to do the statistical analysis for a black belt project. The final result will contain so much variation and error the chances of getting a good result would be difficult. Create passion for your products and services in the marketplace by starting to hear voices.