Voice of the Customer Definition
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jun 15, 2009
voice of the customer (abbreviation VOC) – noun
- The wants and needs of customers expressed with the customer’s own language. “Let’s get rid of ‘opinioneering’ and start building cars that meet the voice of the customer!” - Neil Eldin and Verda Hikle, 1987.
- The perspective of the customer. “Ms MacFarlane is responsible for representing the voice of the customer and providing leadership on customer communication and support.” - Infomedia Annual Report, 2009.
- Text or speech collected from customers through information systems including email, forums, surveys and call-center systems. “Develop the data collection and mining methodologies, statistical analysis tools, and analytics reporting package for voice of the customer inputs.” – job posting [now offline], 2009
I used the phrase “voice of the customer” last week in passing with a new colleague, who asked me for a definition. I rattled off something similar to the first definition, then went searching for a good web page to point him to. The few pages that I found had prescriptive definitions, defining the term how they want people to use it. No one actually seemed to consider how people really used it.
One of my favorite blogs is
Language Log, where linguists write for a general audience about various and sundry linguistic issues (one of the contributors is the author of
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). Inspired by their coverage of how words change, and indulging my own inner lexicographer for the first time since I defined
firmographic, let's look at how the jargon phrase “voice of the customer” has evolved.
Google News indicates that the phrase originally grew out of the
Quality Function Deployment method of translating customer inputs into products and processes. Consider the following supporting quotes to be the voice of the customer of users of the phrase “voice of the customer”!
- 1986
- “QFD—A Structured Approach to Understanding the Voice of the Customer” [PA Davis, IEEE Conference Proceedings, 1986 – the first occurrence I could find that didn’t literally mean a human voice]
- 1987
- “Included among seven philosophical goals sought by the new program are that ‘the voice of the customer is understood and drives the whole process’ and that education and training will be continued ‘and will support the quality improvement process.’”
- 1989
- “QFD, popularly called ‘the voice of the customer,’ is a team approach to product design involving representatives from the customer's organization, the manufacturer's organization, and the manufacturer's supplier's organization.”
- “Specification limits or tolerances represent the ‘voice of the engineer,’ which frequently conflicts with the ‘voice of the customer.’”
- 1990
- “Stempel has to create a corporate culture that turns catchy phrases like ‘listening to the voice of the customer’ into reality.”
- 1991
- “The aim of TQE is to maintain employees' focus on the voice of the customer and to promote quality performance in every corporate task.”
- “One of the reasons Taurus has been so successful is that its design has been guided by the voice of the customer throughout its product history.”
- “Total quality brings the voice of the customer into the organization and transmits it to each link in the chain of operations.”
And some quotes from this year that show a greater diversity of meaning:
- “Chief Marketing Officers are the voice of the customer and define a vision for future organizational growth and vitality within a company.”
- “My goal is to be the voice of the customer within InteliCloud. We can have the greatest product in our minds, but it's the customer that dictates the product path.”
- “The Clarabridge Content Mining Platform provides Global 1000 enterprises an analytical view of text-based verbatims found in voice of the customer feedback channels such as call center notes, qualitative survey feedback, Web 2.0 content, online forums, reviews and customer warranty forms.”
- “The quantitative stuff is taking the temperature twice a year with the voice of the customer. Both those surveys come in to that scorecard.”
- “VOC: Voice of the customer, market research programs designed to uncover customer requirement and needs. While VOC is often considered a synonym for CEM, it is less oriented to improving day-to-day customer experiences as it is concerned with the longer view of business improvement.” [For the record, VOC as the abbreviation for “voice of the customer” outnumbers VOTC as the abbreviation by 15:1, according to Google.]
- “We feel that with the three voices, you can find on Citysearch, the voice of the customer, the voice of the business owner and editor, we have restored a balance to city guides that has been lost.”
Finally, I wonder how many words for “customer” those exceptional salespeople who can sell ice to Eskimos have?