Tag Archives: voc

Want to Elevate your Service Level? Listen to the Voice of the Customer.

Posted on by
Reply

“The best advertising is done by satisfied customers,” as famously stated by American Marketing author, Philip Kotler. So, it should come as no surprise that meeting customer expectations and driving customer satisfaction continue to be the number one priority for businesses. But what’s most important to note is that customer satisfaction should always be a moving target – if you’re fortunate enough to have “achieved” it at one point in time, you’ll simply have to aim higher the following year.


Customer Service: Then vs. Now


Historically, the concept of customer service applied primarily to companies who provided their customers a service offering. Organizations that produced goods had different things on which to focus – from manufacturing to supply chains to distribution.

But that was then.

In recent years, however, there has been a paradigm shift. The focus on customer satisfaction seems to be equally as strong in both product-producing companies … Read more...

The Voice of the Customer—Part 4: Turning Silence into Golden Opportunities

Posted on by
Reply

Silent needs are those that the customer cannot always express or imply, perhaps because they are not even aware of them. While customers can’t articulate them, researchers still need to uncover them, as they can mean the difference between success and failure over the full lifecycle of the product or service. In this blog, we’ll look at a few approaches that can be used to articulate and uncover the silent Voice of the Customer requirements.  

Voice of the Customer Table (VoCT) 

The premise of the Voice of the Customer Table (VoCT) is that while customers can articulate what they want, those wants don’t always represent what they really need. For example, if the customer says “the brakes on this car are terrible,” this could be restated as “I need to reduce the vehicle’s momentum easily at any time.” An example using this scenario is presented in Table 1. Organizations can use the VoCT to discover and respond to the customer’s … Read more...

Quality Management Tools for Enabling Customer Relationships

Posted on by
Reply

In February 2002, the United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, uttered the following infamous phrase:

“There are known-knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known-unknows, that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown-unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s clever rejoinder fills in the obvious missing element and demonstrates the secret wisdom of Rumsfeld’s analysis:

“…What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the ‘unknown knowns,’ the things that we don’t know that we know.”

When it comes to knowing what customers want, we could learn a lot from Rumsfeld and Žižek. Sometimes customers know what they want and how to articulate it; sometimes they know what they want but not how to articulate it. Even more difficult to understand is when customers don’t … Read more...