TEI 071: How product managers can conduct Voice of the Customer research- with Gerry Katz - a podcast by Chad McAllister, PhD - Helping Product Managers become Product Masters

This discussion is about Voice of the Customer (VOC). When it comes to VOC experts, there are only a handful of people that match the experience of my guest today, helping hundreds of companies with VOC research and training many more practitioners.

His name is Gerry Katz. He is also the author of several published papers on the topic, a contributor to professional books, guest lecturer at MIT, Harvard, and other top schools.

 

During the interview, you’ll hear us discuss:



* what VOC is and is not,

* the 4-step approach for using VOC, and

* tips for conducting VOC interviews.



 

Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators

Summary of questions discussed:



* What is VOC? In a nutshell, it is the process of gathering and understanding customer needs. While that sounds ridiculously simplistic, it actually isn’t. There are so many pitfalls, or so many rookie mistakes that people make in trying to understand customer needs, that an entire science has grown up around this area.





* What is not VOC but is often mistaken for it? To start with, it’s not asking what customers want. If you ask Mr. or Mrs. Customer, tell me what you want, tell me what you need, the customer thinks they’re supposed to go into solution mode and start describing the exact features and the exact solutions they want. Now, unfortunately most customers aren’t all that creative, and so all they do is play back features and solutions that already exist in the marketplace. If you take that as your guidance, almost by definition, you will never do better than a me-too product. Instead, a much better approach is to ask about customer’s experiences. Another misunderstanding is thinking of VOC as any kind of market research. VOC is actually a subset of the entire field of market research. VOC also is treated as a means of measuring customer satisfaction, but that is not its purpose. Other tools, such as the Net Promoter Score, measure satisfaction.





* What are the roots of VOC?  John Houser published a famous paper called The House of Quality, which was the first important English language description of a Japanese product development technique called QFD, or Quality Function Deployment. In order to do QFD, you have to start off with a detailed list of customer needs. Abby Griffin, a dissertation student of John’s, decided a good doctoral dissertation would be to study how companies understand customer needs in support of new product development and innovation. Her dissertation won the thesis prize at MIT and her and John turned it into the journal paper that essentially coined the term and created the field. The paper was published in 1993 in the journal titled Marketing Science. In the paper, they offered a four-part definition of Voice of the Customer. I won’t go into great detail, because we only have a half hour, but the parts are a (1) detailed list of customer wants and needs, (2) expressed in the customers’ own words, (3) organized into a hierarchy, and (4) prioritized by the customer.





* How can a product manager conduct VOC research? It starts off with a series of one-on-one interviews. We conduct face-to-face interviews, and in some cases they have to be done by telephone. You will create 2-3 times as many needs if you record the interviews, transcribe them, and then analyze from a transcript, as opposed to the more usual process of note-taking, even if a colleague records needs while you interview. After conducting 30-40 interviews and transcribing them, it’s time to pull out the needs – perhaps around 100 unique needs — from the transcriptions and enter them into a database. Then create an affinity diagram of the needs by associating related needs into groupings called buckets. Abby’s research showed that customers are likely to affinitize differently from the way researchers...

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