7.7 Tools: Identifying Needs—Voice of the Customer

One of the crucial aspects of any Lean Six Sigma improvement project is understanding what performance standards you must meet to satisfy your customers. As hinted earlier, the voice of the customer (VOC) is a tool that you will use to understand your customer's needs and expectations directly from their perspective. You then translate the VOC into requirements you can measure and use to improve your process—the critical-to-quality (CTQs).

But what is the customer's voice? It is the feedback you obtain from the organization’s customers—or your process’s customers—that specifies their thoughts on whether aspects of the service are satisfying or dissatisfying. You can find the customer’s voice through several methods, including surveys, focus groups, interviews, observations, customer complaints, and postings.

VOC data-gathering techniques can be both qualitative and quantitative; if you want to develop a truly complete picture of the customer experience, you need to obtain information from multiple sources. We sometimes call this procedure triangulating information. Each source has its advantages and drawbacks, but when combined they ensure you can hear the customer’s voice clearly. Integrating all these sources of customer intelligence makes it much easier for you and your team to understand the situation's reality and act accordingly.

Planning the VOC

Asking the right questions in the right way will assist you in obtaining valuable data for the project improvement. There are two types of VOC: reactive feedback and proactive feedback. These are also distinguished as general feedback, which falls under reactive, or specific feedback, which would be considered proactive.

Reactive VOC Data

You and your organization often obtain general customer feedback data through customer complaints, feedback forms, product returns, contracts or service cancellations, market share changes, and other passive information such as social media comments. This type of data is reactive and arrives regardless of whether you or your organization collect it. They are typically of a general nature and frequently are informative but does not suffice for improvement projects.

Proactive VOC Data

When you start an improvement project, you and your team need feedback specific to a problem or situation. The goal here is to ask precise questions that address the issue and the particular process you are tackling. This type of data is proactive and arrives only if the organization or improvement team collect it deliberately. This data supplies the type of information that you and your team need for your improvement project.

Below you have some of the steps pertaining to the planning of VOC data collection:

• Choose stakeholders to interview

• Develop the interview questions

• Setup the interviews

• Assign interviews to team members

Your data collection plan should also include the following:

• A brief description of your project

• The customer segment you are targeting

• The specific data you need

• Operational definition of potentially ambiguous words

• How your team will analyze the data

Collecting the Data

You now perform the interviews to collect VOC data from your stakeholders. A few pointers that you should keep in mind:

• Record answers in bullet point format to facilitate data organization later

• Listen rather than talk so that you can understand the interviewee's perspective

• Write down what the interviewees say in their own words

Organizing the Data

You finish the process by analyzing the data you collected. You can group multiple related comments appearing in the interview answers into particular groups. Affinity diagrams can help you in the process of creating the categories.

Converting VOC Statements to CTQs

As discussed earlier in this topic, to achieve a better understanding of how to measure the quality of a process, you and your team will need to convert VOC statements to CTQs. You can accomplish this task using a diagramming process called a CTQ Tree.

You start a CTQ tree with a specific and critical customer need that you produced in the previous stage using an affinity diagram. You then break that need down into drivers and use the drivers to create requirements. You will find that specific requirements are easier to convert to measurable quality components. Each CTQ is unique, but they follow the same general form displayed in Figure 7.4.

As an example we'll use the travel settlement process discussed earlier. After interviewing various stakeholders, it became clear that fast settlement was important to the main customer of the process. Upon examining the interview quotes, the following CTQ tree helped translate the voice of the customer into more measurable items. Figure 7.5 shows the results.

Note that you do not need to have an equal pattern for drivers and requirements. As you can see in Figure 7.5, some drivers will have more requirements. If you identify multiple needs that are critical to your customer, you can also create multiple CTQ trees.