Tag Archives: voc

How to Find the Right Answers Listening to the Voice of the Customer

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Staying connected via online communitites

Over my career, I’ve relied heavily on online communities to get support and share best practices for critical software I use on a daily basis. The story of my time at Intelex has been no different.

When I started as a trainer 9 years ago, we had a thriving online community called Intelex Exchange that I logged onto daily to help speed up the process of learning how to use Intelex so that I quickly could ramp up so that I could train and coach others on it. Intelex Exchange also offered a great opportunity to interact with customers and other users of Intelex that I hadn’t had a chance to work with yet. I learned a lot from my experience with Intelex Exchange and it helped me grow as a trainer and later, in my other roles at Intelex.

Over the years, I feel like we’ve let some of … Read more...

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

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“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...

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

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“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...

Voice of the Customer Part 5: Creating Meaningful Customer Experiences

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In this final look at the Voice of the Customer, we’ll look at what you can do for your customer after you collect and organize all the information about their stated, implied, and silent needs.  

While VoC can be useful for uncovering customer preferences regarding pricing or product features, the goal of a truly insightful VoC process is to discover what constitutes a meaningful customer experience. Customer experience is built on the premise that while customers are often rational decision makers, they are also emotional and value experiences that are pleasurable, beneficial, and educational. Furthermore, they value experiences that allow them to co-create those values through their interaction with brands and companies. (Hwang and Seo, 2016)  

Total Customer Experience (TCE) describes the end-to-end process that encompasses the social, physical, and emotional realities of the customer as they move from the initial stages of awareness to the post-transactional “nurture” stage. (Hwang and Seo, 2016) With the democratization of technology contributing … Read more...

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

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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...

How Ignoring the Voice of the Customer (VoC) Reduces Customer Safety

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Why women are less safe than men when driving 

A study at the University of Virginia, soon to be published in the academic journal Traffic Injury Prevention, has determined that women are at greater risk of injury or death in motor vehicle accidents because safety tests are conducted using crash test dummies that mimic the physiology only of men. 

According to the authors of the study, despite the fact that female physiology differs from that of males in areas such as distribution of muscle and fat, bone alignment, and features of the pelvis, most crash test dummies in use today are still based on male models from the 1960s. As a result, important factors such as how differences in breast tissue impact the effectiveness of the three-point seatbelt and how range of joint motion during menstruation makes females more susceptible to injury, are not widely considered in most automotive safety … Read more...

A Digital Transformation for Voice of the Customer (VoC)

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Fuji Xerox launched a digital transformation project to modernize voice of the customer and raised their Net Promoter Score from -4 to +35.

In the late 2000’s, Fuji Xerox changed its strategy from “Make & Sell” to “Sense & Respond.” The company wanted to be more agile and responsive to changing customer needs, instead of relying on long product development lifecycles and the hope that a market would be in place when a product was released. They decided to overhaul their Voice of the Customer (VoC) program for Industry 4.0. (Sachamanorom & Senoo, 2016) In the process, Fuji identified customer needs according to the three levels and provided labels (VoC 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0) to describe the increase in maturity as new varieties of data were added:

  • Stated needs = knowledge from customer (VoC 1.0)
  • Implied needs = knowledge about customer (VoC 2.0)
  • Hidden needs = knowledge discovered through interactions
… Read more...

Your Customer can tell you what you need to know. Are you listening?

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In our first blog we talked about why listening to the Voice of the Customer is so important and gave you a quick overview of what the customer can potentially communicate to help you improve your business’ efficiency and productivity.

In this second blog you’ll learn about the first and most obvious way the customer communicates with an organization: stated needs. These are needs that the customer is able to articulate and which can be captured using the tools we’re going to talk about below.

Some of the means by which organizations can capture stated needs are already in regular use by marketing and customer experience teams. None are obligated to use all of them, but using a broad selection of them can ensure a business is able to get the broadest cross section of articulated needs from its customers. 

Surveys and Direct Elicitation 

Surveys are a popular method for collecting feedback that is … Read more...

What is the Voice of the Customer?

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Businesses are constantly speaking to their customer base using a strategic blend of marketing channels and public relations to optimize engagement. It’s an easy way to control their message, create customer loyalty, drive customer retention and leverage a consistent brand image. But how much listening do they do?

Listening to the customer is incredibly important and failing to engage with actionable, data driven intelligence can result in customer dissatisfaction and a deterioration of the customer relationship. This skill is especially important in the early stages of product and service development. Ensuring satisfaction from the beginning of the customer journey can help reduce the likelihood of waste and rework later.

The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a process to help organizations drive continuous improvement and innovation through insight gained from customer feedback data. This can be a massive undertaking, so without a clearly defined methodology for understanding the customer experience … Read more...

Quality Management Tools for Enabling Customer Relationships

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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...