In
marketing
Marketing is the act of acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers. It is one of the primary components of Business administration, business management and commerce.
Marketing is usually conducted by the seller, typically a retailer or ma ...
and
quality management
Total quality management, Total Quality management (TQM), ensures that an organization, product, or service consistently performs as intended, as opposed to Quality Management, which focuses on work process and procedure standards. It has four mai ...
, the voice of the customer (VOC) summarizes customers' expectations, preferences and aversions.
A widely used form of customer's voice
market research
Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers. It involves understanding who they are and what they need. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining com ...
produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives.
VOC studies typically consist of both qualitative and quantitative research steps and are generally conducted at the start of any new product, process, or service design initiative in order to better understand the customer's wants and needs, and as the key input for new product definition,
quality function deployment (QFD), and the setting of detailed design specifications.
Data gathering
Much has been written about this process,
and there are many possible ways to gather the information –
focus group
A focus group is a group interview involving a small number (sometimes up to ten) of demographically predefined participants. Their reactions to specific researcher/evaluator-posed questions are studied. Focus groups are used in market researc ...
s, individual interviews,
contextual inquiry
Contextual inquiry (CI) is a user-centered design (UCD) research method, part of the contextual design methodology. A contextual inquiry interview is usually structured as an approximately two-hour, one-on-one interaction in which the researcher w ...
, ethnographic techniques,
conjoint analysis
Conjoint analysis is a survey-based statistical technique used in market research that helps determine how people value different attributes (feature, function, benefits) that make up an individual product or service.
The objective of conjoint an ...
, etc. All involve a series of structured in-depth interviews, which focus on the customers' experiences with current products or alternatives within the category under consideration. Needs statements are then extracted, organized into a more usable hierarchy, and then prioritized by the customers.
Involvement
It is critical that the
product development
New product development (NPD) or product development in business and engineering covers the complete process of launching a new product to the market. Product development also includes the renewal of an existing product and introducing a product ...
core team are involved in this process. They must be the ones who take the lead in defining the topic, designing the sample (i.e. the types of customers to include), generating the questions for the discussion guide, either conducting or observing and analyzing the interviews, and extracting and processing the needs statements.
Target groups
According to American Production and Inventory Control Society (
APICS
The Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM) is a not-for-profit international educational organization offering certification programs, training tools, and networking opportunities to increase workplace performance. Formed in 1957, it w ...
) the definition of voice of the customer is: "Actual customer descriptions in words for the functions and features customers desire for goods and services". In the strict definition, as relates to
quality function deployment, the term customer indicates the external customer of the supplying entity.
See also
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User research
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Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subje ...
*
ITIL
ITIL (previously and also known as Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a framework with a set of practices (previously processes) for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus ...
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Conjoint analysis
Conjoint analysis is a survey-based statistical technique used in market research that helps determine how people value different attributes (feature, function, benefits) that make up an individual product or service.
The objective of conjoint an ...
References
Further reading
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Voice of the Customer: Capture and Analysis'.
McGraw Hill Professional
McGraw Hill is an American education science company that provides educational content, software, and services for students and educators across various levels—from K-12 to higher education and professional settings. They produce textbooks, ...
.
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Acquiring, Processing, and Deploying: Voice of the Customer'.
CRC Press
The CRC Press, LLC is an American publishing group that specializes in producing technical books. Many of their books relate to engineering, science and mathematics. Their scope also includes books on business, forensics and information technol ...
.
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Satisfaction: How Every Great Company Listens to the Voice of the Customer'.
Penguin
Penguins are a group of aquatic flightless birds from the family Spheniscidae () of the order Sphenisciformes (). They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere. Only one species, the Galápagos penguin, is equatorial, with a sm ...
.
Product management
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