DO – Have a broad-based system to collect and use customer and market input.
I have selected this DO because I believed that the organizations must incur adequate customers’ information before it can make informed decisions. The organization would know which of the existing requirements are functional and nonfunctional through different customer information collection techniques. Stratifying the customer requirements will make prioritization a lot easier. It helps the organization to prioritize the customers’ priorities.
Just like the communication process, customer and market input may come from different levels; as such, 360-degree. From those levels, the needs of current happy and unhappy customers, lost customers, competitors’ customers and potential customers may still vary and there. There are also spoken and unspoken needs that cannot be revealed by telephone surveys, for example, but the organization could obtain perhaps through focus groups or personal interviews. Based on this, they would have to admit that a single survey is not enough.
Basically, there are several VOCs and organizations could consider all of them as ‘reliable sources’. Different organizations serve more than a single group of customers; thus, there is a need for more than one collating method that the organization should utilize. These segments of customer could clarify their specific needs and wants and will make the information gathered to be more logical and even more actionable.
The advantage for the organization is to be more focused on customer critical-to-quality factors and more focused on measuring them as the measure of inconsistency would be relatively smaller. In effect, the organization could eliminate or lessen a significant amount of noise that can confuse the interpretation of different customer requirements.
The significance of using different choice of input gathering techniques is on effective capturing of VOC and departing away from wrong conclusions and irregularities. Further, the multifunctional methods of collection facilitate the identification of opportunites for customers’ excitement and the identification of what the organizations really need to know when it comes to their customers needs. It is possible to go beyond what the customer says and to make effective use of this observational information. Implicitly, collecting techniques compel the organizations to develop marketing platforms and product and service evolutions which will serve to meet customers’ expectations.
Collective VOC directly submits to ‘voice of the market’. Your market drives the organizations margins, the competitive capability, market share and growth rates and synergies. Any organization would like to protect their most important markets because they insure that every Six Sigma imperative is congruent to the organizational growth strategies. Informations on market input are driven by the informations from customer input. Organizations serve diverse individuals and group that make up their markets. VOC, then and the array of measuring then could possibly make the organizations prioritize their market’s priorities.
DON’T – Close your mind to new information on what customers really want.
The reason I chose this DON’T is because of the fact that many organizations has the tendency to miss the most important point of VOC system. I observed that many organizations fail due to neglecting the face that they have to act upon those gathered information. It is well-known that VOC produces detailed outline of customer requirements. They even serve as catalyst for setting product and service specifications and innovation. Yet, many organizations chose to dwell on their beliefs instead of determining the weight of customers’ voice.
The problem lies in using the VOC even if or especially when it distorts organizational norms or what the organizations perceived to be ‘acceptable’. The fundamental principle of VOC strategy is to acquire pertinent customer information and use them. The question is: What if the customers identify important issues but the organization hesitates to address them?
The truth is not all informations could be useful to the organizations – if they want informations to be in that state. Customer requirements are prescriptive strategies that purport a learning organization. But if they chose to live inside the box instead of approaching the real word, these organizations are doomed to fail. They themselves are limiting their capabilities to establish functional customer requirement schemes.
One important premise is central to the though that organizations have to manage the fact that customers has final say even if there are ‘best practices’ internally. Products and services are validated by the customers and the informations that come from them are reliable. So if results are somewhat questionable, then it is the time to review and reassess internal decisions, market segmentation schemes and organizational priorities. Many of these organizations prioritize economic opportunities more compared to surpassing their customers’ expectations.
Most organizations chose to simply realign strategies and assumed that they were being fulfilled in their own. When VOC is opposes the ‘voice of the organization’, there would be functional conflict. The prevalence of the voice of the organization will only put negative quality to the product and thus jeopardize the process of value creation that satisfies the customers. Functional conflicts are not being used the way it should be.
To illustrate, many companies claim that they are No. 1 yet many of them are not honoring money-back guarantees and warranties as was promised in times of transactions. Eventually, there would be complains or it could reflect the performance of the service in customer satisfaction surveys to which the company would do nothing to deal with. They are just paying lip service to the concept of VOC and thus lose the opportunity for a competitive edge.
Bibliography
Pande, P. S., Neuman, R. P. & Cavanagh, R. R. (2000). The Six Sigma Way: How GE, Motorola, and Other Top Companies are Honing Their Performance. McGraw-Hill Professional.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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