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:
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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 continue reading…
The group included around 100+ product managers and marketers from companies of various sizes and industries.
