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Voice of the Customer Spoken Here

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Whenever someone discusses Voice of the Customer, they almost always use the phrase "listen to the Voice of the Customer". We need to speak Voice of the Customer as well.

Too often, the typical questionnaire is written in the language of the employee, not the customer. It is written from the sponsoring organization's perspective, uses industry jargon and makes subtle distinctions that the average customer is oblivious too (see Multiple Choice Lists Only a Product Manager Could Love).

All of this is bad news for a survey: the respondent gives less accurate answers, because they don't interpret questions the way they were intended. Respondents' frustration with the survey grows, prompting them to skip questions that aren't required, or - when running into required questions - to abandon the survey altogether.

To me, an important goal of qualitative research is to learn how customers speak: the language they use and the words they select to describe what's important to them. In fact, VOC research can be a Rosetta Stone for questionnaire authors, helping them translate between EmployeeSpeak and CustomerSpeak. For instance, here's a question as it might have been written by an engineer, compared to that same question written for the customer:

The engineers in the audience are probably already alarmed that we are equating 2MB per MP3 file (e.g., per song). We're not; we're just using useful units. When it comes time to translate those into specs, the engineers will need to transform those requirements into gigabyte requirements using a rule of thumb for average song size. A pain, yes, for the engineers, but the survey data will be more accurate by embracing the customer viewpoint. Many customers - and here I am going to lose the engineers altogether - can't tell you how many KB or MB are in a GB; a gigabyte is too abstract a measurement for them.

Speaking of abstract, we did consider using the question "How many hours of music do you want to keep on your music player?" but found that "songs" was a more natural unit of measurement than "hours".

So, as you curl up to read thousands of verbatim comments or transcripts from your MROC or focus group, try to absorb the language and word choice, not just the opinions and attitudes. Your surveys will be the better for it.