The voice of the customer examples

The voice of the customer examples

People often think that customers are the buyers of your overall product or service. However, this is not true; (in)direct colleagues are also seen as customers. Continuous contact with your colleagues ensures that you find out what they want from you. This then ensures that their needs can be met, which ultimately leads to reducing waste in your work (environment).

Thus, it is important to engage in daily voice of the customer examples retrieval and integrate it into your organization in such a way that it becomes an automatic action. This leads to a true VoC culture, trust from your sides and a daily elimination of waste.

3 Tips for Retrieving the Voice of the Customer

Using the following 3 tips, we will show you how to retrieve the Voice of the Customer (also called customer desire). At this stage it is important to have a clear idea of who the different customers or customer groups are.

• Collect information using open-ended questions, without using an online questionnaire. It is useful to use the “5 times why?” method to get to the heart of the customer’s needs. This method will help customers answer the questions because they reason from their existing frame of reference. Also, they are not always aware of the capabilities of a product or service.
• Call to life a Customer Journey Mapping session, in which you walk through the process through the eyes of the customer. Ask yourself when there is contact with the customer and how the customer experiences the process. Want to learn more about Customer Journey Mapping? Read more about it here.
• Mapping the voice of the customer examples is not a one-time process. Both the customers themselves and their needs are constantly changing over time. This is accelerated by the technological developments we are in the middle of. It is all the more important to stay in constant contact with your customers.

3 ways to stay in touch with your customers

As we have seen above, it is very important to stay in continuous contact with the customer. It is often difficult to find an effective and efficient way to do this. Below we give you 3 ways by which it becomes possible to achieve this continuous process:

• Net Promoter Score: This is a simple but powerful method to measure customer satisfaction with one question and get an indication of the growth potential of your company or product. This method can be captured down to the employee level and used to improve one’s own work every day.
• Co-creation: This method creates a collaboration between customer and organization to develop products and services. It is a step towards staying in close contact with customers in the further development of what is offered.
• Voice of the Customer employee: An employee in an organization who spends all work time retrieving the Voice of the Customer, both internally and externally.

How to make the Voice of the Customer measurable

Identifying voice of the customer examples is often harder than you think. The examples below show what we may encounter as voice of the customer examples in practice:

• Customers want assurance of delivery on agreed date;
• They want answers to their questions;
• Often customer services do not have answers to customer questions;
• Placing orders should be easier;
• Deliveries must always meet the agreed requirements;
• Customers want more insight into delivery times.

The above needs are simply not concrete enough to get started. The premise of the Voice of the Customer must be measurable. But how can you measurably demonstrate that these needs are being met? Within Lean and Six Sigma, we work with the Critical To Quality (CTQ) tool. It is a way of making the voice of the customer examples concrete by attaching critical quality characteristics to the customer’s needs. How to determine this CTQ can be read here.

After it is clear exactly what the customers want, you can proceed with the KANO model to place and prioritize customer desires.

So:

• Ensure continuous contact with your customers;
• Understand the critical quality characteristics of the Voice of the Customer.
• Only in this way can you achieve efficient value creation!

Also read about prioritize features!