I Can’t Hear What You’re Seeing
For many years, the term Voice of the Customer has been a source of incalculable confusion and a hazardous source of misdirection. The reality of dealing with a cacophony of voices that can often come from the many interfaces and service points is daunting for some. Discerning the signal from the noise fosters subjective simplification and can and too often yield risky and sometimes shallow insights carried forward into our delivery of services. We make decisions about requirements without clearly understanding what creates value for our customer. The simplification can put much more focus on the past at the expense of consequences that await the future.
Some reasons may be:
- Understanding the processes, players and decision-making in the initial contracting process. The customer we see and hear often is not the customers we will serve. Tom procures and Mary operates. The functionality (and different points of view) is currently unavoidable in the public sector and lives well in the private.
- Asking the customer for requirements and then setting quality specifications for our outputs. The customer is limited by what they believe you do, could do, or can’t do. Lost opportunity results from the filtered data.
- Poor differentiation between transactional satisfaction and customer loyalty. There are often very different reasons for staying, renewing, or leaving.
- Equating meeting delivery requirements with delivering value. One comes from walking in our own shoes, not in the customer’s. Walking and hearing are very different.
- Limiting knowledge of service costs to the price the customer pays. The cost dealing with us can be too high as the relationship ensues past the start up.
There are many, far too many others. Over the years, I’ve concluded that the analysis yielding the better insights has come from seeing the world and what is truly required through the customer’s lens, looking forward, always forward. Many years ago in a conversation with Dr. Noriaki Kano, he shared the importance of “Customer In” versus “Product Out.” He’s been right all along. The levels of insight (le mot juste) delivered through lenses versus voices is paradigm shaking. In the movie Beyond the Sea, Sandra Dee says to Bobby Darin, “Bobby, people hear what they see!” She was right.
So,
- How do we decide what our customer wants or needs?
- Do we know if we’re right?
- Do we rely on surveys to look forward with our customer?
- Did we lose a customer by surprise?
- Did we add value?
- Do we rely on surveys and complaints for our lenses?
Thoughts?
