We all have been there. The frustrating feeling of not being understood. It can test our patience, wreck our relationships, and for a company, it could mean losing customers. This book is about how to listen to the customer’s voice, not just those in the customer service department but everybody, right down to the factory floor. When a business can align its people to know and understand what their buyers are saying, then that company becomes like a collimated laser beam, quickly addressing the problems, delivering products (or services) that not only satisfy the customers but wows them.
Customers ask something about our product and many times it may sound easy and straightforward just to know later that it is not what the customer really wanted. The Voice of the Customer is often elusive, so we will help you understand your customer’s voice, translating their words into the products that we deliver to them.
Each part of the book places emphasis on three specific business functions, and they will be interconnected in the last part when we put it all together. The three business functions that need to work as one cohesive and unified team are: commercial (sales and marketing), research and development (product properties and services), and operations or manufacturing (product quality). Additionally, each chapter explains the information in a logical and sequential manner, so the reader can thread the knowledge imparted in one section of the book to the next. It is advisable to read the book sequentially, and if you are keen to know more about a topic, you can use the table of contents or index to focus on a specific subject.
The key to an effective relationship with your customer is to clearly articulate their needs and wants by fully understanding their viewpoint. This is easier said than done. Companies that offer superior products not only deliver outstanding quality and services but also complement it by listening to the Voice of the Customer, the “VOC”. The VOC involves active listening of your client’s requirements, resonating throughout your organization all the way to the factory floor, becoming the paramount goal.
Listening to the customer describe the pros and cons of our product clarifies what they desire, by capturing everything they said may give us as suppliers a view of being complete and full understanding of their viewpoints. On the other hand, capturing their input verbatim is not enough because the content needs to be interpreted. Once the customer’s voice has been defined, it can be threaded within the framework of the supplier’s business functions throughout the entire organization, having a direct impact on the client’s experience. Achieving this connectivity creates an enterprise capable of turning out outstanding products that surprise and delight the customer.
The skill to transform their needs into practical solutions will be explored in this book. We will explain how to obtain this goal and harmonize different business departments to address the customer’s needs: these broader business functions include commercial, research and development, and operations. The framework of the Houses of Quality will be our main tool. We will navigate through the houses and accumulate the details needed to ensure a clear and quantitative view of the customer and each business function. Several tools will augment the Houses of Quality such as the Kano model, brainstorming, Pareto analysis, and a few others. Also, depending on the complexity of the product being made, it will determine the number of houses needed. The approaches taken throughout these pages will highlight the structure needed for success and how to make a product with the customer in mind.
Take the journey through these pages to explore your company through a different lens, so you, the strategist, can map the customer’s voice all the way to the factory floor.