The Backlash against Voice of the Customer Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Apr 05, 2010
Whenever Steve Jobs introduces a new product (what, you didn't buy your iPad Saturday, either?), I am immediately inundated with comments to the effect of: "Since Apple does no market research, we don't have to do any either." And someone will bring up Henry Ford on market research: "If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse." Now, even the Marketing Leadership Roundtable of the Corporate Executive Board is saying things like, "The Problem with VOC? The Customer Isn't Always Right."
This backlash against the Voice of the Customer is completely misplaced. The mistake is assuming that the Voice of the Customer itself has all the answers. VOC is an input, not an output.
Voice of the Customer data is the chunk of marble from which you must carve out a new product design. You collect your VOC data through surveys, online communities, support calls and other listening posts. Once you have the data, you need to discard commentary that doesn't apply to the focus of your current work, just as you need to use a heavy chisel to rough out the stone. Take all the comments you received, look for common themes and use an internal cross-functional team to select the 20 or so most important functional requirements. As a sculptor sees shapes in stone, you need to see ideas in Voice of the Customer comments, becoming skilled at interpretation, understanding what customers really want, for instance, when they say "a faster horse". Then turn that interpretation and analysis into a survey of customers to have them weigh the relative importance of the top requirements you teased out of the rock.
Next, come up with product designs and benchmark them against the customer requirements, rating each product for how well they meet or exceed expectations for each requirement. A few features will stand out from the rest for seeming to meet the most important requirements best. This is how a breakthrough product like the original iPod Shuffle can be born; the Shuffle sacrificed the previous perceived must-have requirements of a display screen, applications and games in an MP3 player with the new must-have requirements of low price and a light weight.
Once you have a design for a product or service that appears to do the best at meeting prioritized requirements, determine how much of it can actually be created. For products, engineering limitations may introduce tradeoffs (for instance, light tablet computers with long battery life, since long-lasting batteries add weight). You will need to cycle back and forth between the ideal design and the practical design, chipping away stone bit by bit.
Only through the use of the proper tools and processes can you carve a beautiful product out of the stone of Voice of the Customer data. Resist the backlash against Voice of the Customer research and see it for what it really is: the essential foundation of successful product and service development.