Creating the Requirements – Collecting the Voice of the Customer

Building VOC (Voice of the Customer)

VOC (voice of the customer) is an expression of the effect that a customer would like to have on his life/environment for him to best perform his desired tasks.   The process of developing VOC includes

• Gathering, understanding, targeting, and verifying the needs of non-business ‘actors’ directly affiliated with the entities that purchase the product.
• Understanding and targeting of the needs of paying customers (customer defined quality), both obvious and latent, and will drive product’s competitive advantage in the market.

Simply put, the customer includes the users of the product and those that pay for the product.  Each group has needs and these needs must be identified and characterized.  VOC should be the structured framework that expresses these needs.

The development starts with customer engagements and interviews to collect information and statements that will become VOC.  Most customers, when interviewed, state their needs in terms of solutions to the last problem encountered.  As part of the user needs collection, conscious steps must be taken to identify statements that represent solutions.   The VOC collection step transforms these customer solution statements to true user needs.

The transformation of a solution statement, as opposed to a statement of need, represents a critical step in the VOC collection process.  Solution statements often involve the word “should” or “must”, indicating that the statement is describing the behavior of the system.  The recognition of a solution statement from the customer should prompt the developer/interviewer to probe further with the customer to identify the true need.

The “five-why” tool facilitates driving to the true need. This iterative, question-asking technique explores the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem.  While this technique was originally developed to determine the root cause of a problem, the basic principle of repeatedly driving answers to a supporting “why” question works effectively to determine a true user need statement. Each question forms the basis of the next question.  The following table demonstrates the application of the “five-why” tool.

A “Five-Why” Example

In this example, the series of questions, successive “whys” have provided the true user need as the following statement:

I need the patient to receive the exact prescription as ordered by the doctor.

Following the collection process, the needs statements need to be evaluated and structured as effective user need statements.  The following are good rules for an effective user need statement

• The statement must reflect the customer’s definition of value – value must be defined and measured from the customer’s perspective
• The statement must have universal acceptance – it should be relevant to all customers
• The statement must be relevant now and in the future
• The statement must prompt a course of action – statements such as “it must be more reliable” or “easy to use” will not define a course of action.
• The statement must not be open to interpretation
• The statement itself shall not confound the way it or other statements are prioritized – be careful that the statements do not overlap.

In order to ensure that the collected statements do conflict or overlap, the collected statements should be reduced to a succinct set of 10-15 user needs.  More than 10-15 user need statements will impact subsequent steps that rely on the user needs, diluting the process of identifying the critical parameters for a successful design.  After the interview process, the user need statements should go through a consolidation pass to reach a final list a 10-15 distinct statements.

An affinity exercise effectively consolidates user need statements.  In an affinity exercise, similar statements are grouped on a whiteboard or wall.  These grouping are then consolidated into a single, summary user need statement.  These summary user need statements become the VOC.

Following the development of the user needs statement, a scoring process engages customers and users to score current product performance as well as establish a score for best-in-class performance against the user need statements.  Scoring should use a Likert scale.  The scale should be a 1-10 range, with 10 as the maximum.  Following scoring, compile the scaled results into a radar chart mapping needs to performance, as shown below.

In many situations, competition (or lack of competition) may impact collecting best-in-class scores.  When a single best-in-class product is difficult to identify, a different best-in-class scoring technique maybe applied.  In this situation, the user should be asked to provide the top score for a particular user need by considering any piece of equipment in the use area.  With this technique, it is very likely that the best-in-class score for each user need will be associated with a different device.  This technique will allow devices without competition to find an applicable best-in-class score.

VOC represents the 10-15 user need statements that drive all subsequent development.  In summary, VOC provides the following

• An understanding of what matters to the customer – Clear, concise statements of needs
• What represents “best in class” – measured against the real user needs
• Where your current product stands – again, measured against the real user needs