VoC: Answering Questions Important to Business

Posted on Dec 29 in Featured, Issues in Customer Research, VoC, VoC News & Issues by robert gerst

Voice of the Customer (VoC) was developed by Yoji Akao in conjunction with Quality Function Deployment (QFD) – a product and service design methodology.  The intent was to embed concrete and clearly specified customer requirements directly into the design specifications of new products – VoC was to identify customer requirements; QFD was to connect them with design specifications. The strategy changed the face of customer research.

This work is now recognized as the global best practice in customer research for product, service and program design. Japanese success in the automobile, electronics and heavy industries cannot be understood without understanding what Dr. Akao did for building products and services that actually produced customer demand or pull.

Different Business Questions, Different Research Methods

Dr. Akao was Professor of Industrial Engineering at Tamagawa University in Tokyo, served on numerous committees of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), the Japaneses Standards Association (JSA) and the former President of the  Japanese Society for Quality Control (JSQC). He knew that identifying what is really important to customers required a whole new approach to capturing and analyzing customer information.

A student of Edwards Deming during Japan’s quality revolution, Dr. Akao understood the difference between enumerative and analytic research methods. Traditional customer research, such as polling, is enumerative; it can determine how many but not how come or why. For example, enumerative research counts how many many people said this or that in response to a survey question. In contrast, analytic research is less concerned with what people say and more concerned with what they do – identifying those things sufficiently important to influence behavior. Different research methods to answer different research questions.

Dr. Akao wanted to know how important various product and service characteristics were to customers. Enumerative research can’t answer these types of questions. But analytic research can because it is designed to separate the wheat from the chaff – to identify those things that have real value for customers. To accomplish these ends, Dr. Akao adapted analytic research methods to the task of customer research and Voice of the Customer was born.

Voice of the Customer: An Analytic Research Methodology

Voice of the Customer then,  is analytic research applied to the task of identifying customer requirements.  Enumerative research, such as polling, identifies what is statistically significant; analytic research, such as VoC,  identifies what is economically significant.

Different Research for Different Purposes and Different Questions

	Traditional Enumerative Research / Polling Surveys	Analytic Customer Research / Voice of the Customer
Purpose:	Count Counting how many people answered this way or that to a survey question or calculating proportions.	Explain Explaining why people like one product more than another or why are sales falling or rising over time.
Significance / Importance:	Statistical Significance A measure of detectability based on differences from an assumed theoretical probability distribution.	Economic/Practical Significance A measure of importance based on differences of value that drive customer behaviour.
Typical Research Questions:	How many people saw our advertisement? How many people say they like our product? How many people say they are satisfied with our service?	Was our advertisement effective at driving sales and why? Do people actually prefer our product and why or why not? Are people satisfied with our service and why or why not?
Focus:	Describing existing conditions.	Changing and improving existing conditions.

Clearly there is a role for both enumerative and analytic research methodologies in business. Enumerative methods are very good for answering enumerative questions, describing how many people can recall seeing a particular ad for example, is an important question in advertising research.

Analytic research in contrast, is good explaining why sales are down or why people didn’t respond to an ad. It is not surprising then, that as important as some enumerative questions are, the vast majority of  questions that are important to business are analytic. You can’t run a business by describing conditions – you must be able to explain why things are happening in order to fix problems and make improvements.

This is one reason that VoC has grown in scope and sophistication since Dr. Akao first gathered and analyzed customer verbatim statements and organized them into design requirements. Voice of the Customer is the global best practice in customer research because it is the only research methodology capable of answering the questions businesses need answered.

VoC s has proven itself invaluable with companies like Bridgestone , Toyota, Toshiba, Ford and Hewlett-Packard. Let us show you how invaluable it can be for you.