Understanding customer needs is extremely critical to develop a successful product. During my first week at one of the companies I previously worked at, the Director of Development at that time asked me “Here is the product we developed, could you please let us know what the value of it is to our customers?” Yes, I was as shocked as you must be right now. Would you develop a product and “hope” that it solves some kind of a market problem? Or would you rather understand your customer needs as the very first step and actually develop something to solve their problem? With the latter, there is no hoping and praying, you know your work is worth it. This is your answer to the “Why” (Why should I care about the Voice-of-the-Client?) question.
Though there are several qualitative and quantitative methods to understand customer needs, for today’s discussion, I would like to focus on the formal Voice of the Client (VOC) method that you could use to understand your customer needs. VOC is a qualitative research approach and as such, findings from this work are directional and subjective in nature.
Let me get something straight before you raise your hand to sign up for this at work- it will take a lot of time and energy to do the formal Voice of the Customer (VOC) session, and even more time to follow-up on the strategic initiatives that may result from this session. This is no trivial task that you could do in your “spare time”.
Key aspects that you need to understand about VOC:
T
hree core principles of VOC are 1) Developing 360 degree view of your business 2)Understanding context from your customer’s aspect and 3)Recognizing “by chance” opportunities (you don’t know what you don’t know – be as open minded as possible)
Who? (Who should you interview?) First and foremost, identify your strategic objective to drive the Voice of the Client session. Then ‘who’ should be interviewed for the VOC session will easily come to you. Current customers are the primary source of information if your aim is to understand the current market. Potential customers are the primary source if your objective is to explore an adjacent market or to enter a completely new market. If you are choosing current customer, make sure you invite both the happy ones and the disgruntled ones to make sure the results are not skewed one way or the other.
How many? (How many interviews) The number varies and is typically determined by the type of product, complexity of your market, number of current clients (in case of current market) and the profile of your target customers. The goal of some VOC sessions is to get “directional” data about customer needs and for some, the goal is to get to statistically valid level in capturing customer needs. I have typically aimed to get 25 to 30 interviews in the past and a quick online search shows that the research for a range of products indicates that, on average, this is 20 interviews.
How to? (How to conduct the session?) While conducting the interview session, use open-ended verbs like explore, uncover, understand and discover to frame a question.–. Avoid close ended questions and be an active listener. Sometimes, customers will get carried away by a feature or functionality that they would like you to add, but you, as the interviewer should steer the conversation and try to understand the root source of the problem so that you can come up with the corrective solution later.
What next? (Possible outcomes of a VOC session) Based on the VOC workshop (read the tactical section below for full details), you will derive some strategic initiatives and key action items for your business in the order of priority based on a point system. Possible outcomes could include anything ranging from a mere feature to an acquisition (I have seen both happen). Whatever is the outcome, the most important thing is to assign a management team member to each of the key action items to make sure there is a follow-up and ensure the team’s collaborative effort is worth all the time and energy. Follow-up work will include validating your findings with further market research and developing business cases to understand all the resources these projects may consume ,especially needed when the action items involve multimillion dollar investments.
Many product managers know what a VOC is about, however, they do not know what it exactly takes to organize one. So, here are the tactical steps involved in doing the VOC session:
Tactical aspects that you need to understand about VOC: (There may be several other ways to do it, but here is one way to do it)
VOC method is based on a well researched approach developed as part of the MIT Sloan research – originally tested by highly renowned companies and applied across several industries
- · Select the core team to conduct the interviews. Core team will include a combination of all cross functional members – marketing, product management, development, operations etc
- · Designate project management resources to manage the project timeline and set the timeline for all the relevant tasks
- · Schedule and conduct the interviews. Depending on your time and budget constraints, you could either conduct in-person or phone interviews. I am personally a big fan of in-person interviews. Stay away from peak summer vacations and Christmas time. Most customers may drop out in the last minute and the ones who will care to reschedule will be the ones who are disgruntled and would like to make sure they get face time with the execs. If that is the case, your results will be skewed as mentioned before.
- · Once all the interviews are done, core team will identify the voices. Specific voices should be highlighted based on what could contribute best to your insight and to the strategic objective set for this VOC session.
- · Leaders will gather for the final workshop once all the interviews and ‘identification of voices’ is done. In person meeting is highly recommended.
- · All “voices” will be printed on small posters and pasted around the conference room – you could divide them into various themes as you see fit for your business.
- · Core team members will be asked to identify the most important voices through voting system. Rest of the voices will be eliminated through several rounds of screening. Continue rounds of elimination until you bring down the voices to 15-25.
- · Initially, some people may think ‘did I fly all the way to sort out post it notes?’, but slowly as the session progresses, they will realize the value of it.
- · Once you have identified the final set of voices through team consensus, identify corresponding strategic initiatives and prioritize. Make sure to assign an executive or management team member to each of the initiatives for follow-up.
Have you conducted a VOC session at your work? What are your thoughts and outcomes? You are welcome to contact me to continue this discussion.
Here is another blog with useful and interesting tips about listening to “Voice of the Customer” from a product management perspective (maintained by Gopal Shenoy):
http://productmanagementtips.com/category/voice-of-the-customer/
