Harnessing the Voice of the Customer- A close-up look at several companies, including International Truck, Medrad, and Seagate Technologies

by Mark J. Deck, Director, PRTM, with input from three practitioners: David H. Hillman, Director, Product Marketing, International Truck and Engine Corporation; Jeffrey J. Thompson, Marketing Manager, Vascular Injection Products, Medrad, Inc.; and Lynne Van Arsdale, Senior Director, Product Planning, Seagate Technology, LLC

Our columnist combines his own knowledge with wisdom from three practitioners talking about how to use Voice of the Customer most effectively throughout the NPD process.

It’s clear that success in new product development (NPD) hinges on meeting important customer needs. At the heart of doing this well is having the ability to capture and harness the Voice of the Customer (VOC) not just in the front end of the process, but throughout the life cycle. However, that’s far easier said than done-judging from the results of the recent new PDMA Foundation report1 that revealed that nearly one-third of new products are unsuccessful. What makes the difference? What goes on under the surface for those practitioners who achieve success more often? What can improve our "listening skills" when it comes to understanding customer needs? We decided to ask practitioners about this, and combine their insights with some of the most salient information revealed at the December, 2003 PDMA VOC conference. Here are the results-"10 Lessons Learned" to keep in mind.

Lesson 1-Hone your listening skills
Want to know what prospective customers need? Go out and spend time with them. But first, equip those in your company who’ll be going out to listen with the right tools. These include planning guidelines, techniques for asking questions, approaches for observing and taking notes, and methodologies for processing those notes and turning them into meaningful requirements. International Truck and Engine Corporation, a global truck Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) headquartered in Warrenville, Ill., trains internal NPD team members to be effective at this. They go out in groups where one person might be on point for a certain targeted interview, with two others observing and taking notes. They learn how to ask questions based on what they are seeing at the time to fully understand the context of customer needs.

They also learn to apply these skills for other key aspects of their design challenge, from cab interior to emissions control. Post-interview processing skills are important as well. "Interviewing itself is energizing. But until you translate that into engineering language, the job isn’t done," explains David Hillman, Director of Product Marketing at International Truck and Engine Corporation.

Lesson 2-Listen to all the right voices
Picking the right target customers to listen to and gaining access to them can be a challenge in and of itself. At Seagate Technology, a leading manufacturer of computer storage devices headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, it’s deemed important to listen to end users and to OEMs that bundle Seagate disk drives into the hardware they sell to end users.

The idea is to develop the end-user VOC, derive and prioritize the engineering attributes that are critical to quality (CTQs), translate those to product needs that should be critical to the OEM customer, and then use those critical to customer attributes (CTCs) to derive the OEM CTQs. The OEM is also approached directly to derive a set of CTCs related to supply chain and manufacturing. It’s impossible for end users to bring out these operational dimensions of need. But according to Lynne Van Arsdale, Senior Director of Product Planning for the Seagate Technology, Advanced Storage Architecture Group, OEMs can be reluctant to participate in these interviews. "By starting with the end-user VOC, we have something we can offer OEMs to convince them to participate in the VOC exercise with us. It also helps us deepen our relationship with our OEMs and get us both focused on adding value for end users." David Hillman of International Truck faces a similar challenge with end users and dealers. "Truck dealers are very protective of their customers. By participating as observers, they learn valuable lessons as well," Hillman says.

Lesson 3-Listen by watching
One characteristic common to all good listening is having good observational skills. "Try to use your two eyes, two ears, and one mouth in the same proportions," says Christina Brodie, Principal at PRTM, and co-author of Voices Into Choices, Acting on the Voice of the Customer.2 At International Truck, this is part of team training. "We encourage the interview team to spend time with the user in their truck, watching for cues to probe about. It helps us raise questions and open dialog around issues we never would have thought to delve into," observes David Hillman.

Some professionals take this even further and engage in specifically targeted observational or ethnographic research. Medrad, Inc., a leading manufacturer of medical devices and 2003 Malcom Baldridge Award recipient, headquartered in Indianola, Pa., has built this capability over time including videotaping, logging activities, and diagramming. According to Jeff Thompson, Marketing Manager for Vascular Injection Products at Medrad, "We use it with leading clinicians to help us digest the entire context of use, revealing key nuggets we can build on to provide distinct value. It’s like riding a bike. We now use these techniques more instinctively and more broadly."

Lesson 4-Set up many "listening posts"
Our first three "Lessons Learned" were mainly about direct interviewing and listening. However, there are many other ways that companies can sense the needs of prospective customers. These include sensing mechanisms such as key account meetings, customer satisfaction surveys, customer advisory boards, front line customer service feedback, sales and channel participants, user groups, internet bulletin boards, and many more. Using all these senses is something that advanced listeners seem to do proactively. "We have our customer listening posts up all the time," says Jeff Thompson at Medrad. "There are sales touch points and marketing touch points. Through an exchange mainly amongst our touch point personnel in a structured, yet informal way, we can learn a great deal. We also take advantage of our Customer Relationship Enhancement (CRE) systems and trade shows. From time to time we will also sponsor a leading physician or researcher to spend time with an entire business unit to generate a dialog about future needs and capabilities."

Lesson 5-Listen as a team
A common thread running across all these lessons learned is the idea of bringing many different functional perspectives to bear in the listening process. Supply chain and purchasing personnel will be more attentive to hearing underlying operational needs than would be engineering personnel who might be more likely to hear product functional or technical needs. Moreover, when it comes time to translating needs into requirements and ideas, all these perspectives contribute to breakthrough concept generation. According to Brodie, "With the right set of disciplines working together to process their varied observations about customers, it’s possible to truly intuit important latent or unstated customer needs."

Medrad encourages senior management to also get involved. "With our VOC process, we can bring insight to our executives, but there’s no substitute for their hearing it directly. Our executives also attend trade shows and spend time with key customers." According to Jeff Thompson, this involvement manifests itself visibly in portfolio management decision making. At International Truck, the sales function is an important partner to ensure there are no hidden issues or disputes that could create problems when engaging customers. Purchasing and reliability functions are also involved to add credibility to decisions that affect these functions. Dave Hillman indicates that "issues get elevated to the customer level, giving all team members a common higher ground where they can rapidly resolve individual functional priorities." Lynne VanArsdale agrees. "I’m constantly amazed at the way our focus on the customer cuts through issues that can take much longer to resolve when functional priorities rule."

Lesson 6-Listen throughout the cycle
Companies that effectively listen to the Voice of the Customer understand that it’s not just a "fuzzy front end" exercise. NPD teams typically need to access the customer repeatedly as they move from concept generation to design and then to development and launch. Medrad provides a good example of such downstream listening. They wanted to build a new line of injection products that were easy and intuitive to use. For some, easy to use meant flexible. But to customers, flexible could rapidly escalate to complex, defeating ease of use. The solution was to create user interface simulators that prospective customers could interact with in different usage scenarios while Medrad team members observed. "This helped us design a simple interface that provided choice without complexity. We even wound up with a number of design patents in the process," said Jeff Thompson.

Lesson 7-Listen in the dark
Okay, this one’s going to take some explaining. It’s based on the old story of a man who was looking for his lost wallet at night and the stranger who approached and asked where he had lost it. "Over there in the dark," was his response. "What good does it do to look over there where I can’t see?" The lesson that many have learned is that listening has to take place in spaces where it might not be so obvious to listen. Medrad’s sponsoring of leading researchers is a direct effort to hear about new, emerging needs. They intentionally seek out venues that may not have much to do with current product lines but which are in adjacent spaces. They call these "white space" opportunities and it’s another way they try to get senior executives involved.

Lesson 8-Listen frugally
Another common theme across experienced customer voice listeners is the need to invest carefully in the time it takes to do it. Many have discovered that despite the benefits, the practical matter is that it is difficult to provide all these different players with adequate customer "soak time." At Seagate Technology, one way to justify the up-front time has been to find downstream ways to repurpose the VOC information for product change efforts. Lynne Van Arsdale indicates that "over the last five months, we’ve had three different opportunities to use the core information gathered for other projects. We view these as hidden dividends that further justify the value." Jeff Thompson would agree. "It’s easy if you can take as long as you need. The business challenge is to do this within a time constraint. For example, we recently had a situation where we could have gone to three different countries to conduct our information gathering. We decided to limit it to two since we already had good applicable insight into one of them."

Lesson 9-Deeply embed listening into the NPD process
One mistake that many make is to treat "Voice of the Customer" as a tool to be used at the option of a team. When companies fail to make it an integral part of the NPD process, it often gets pushed aside in the pressure to meet time and resource constraints. What does it mean to embed listening into the process? It means having it be an explicit set of activities that NPD teams engage in up front, as part of design, as part of testing, and as part of taking the product to market. It also means having clear deliverables that clarify which needs are most important, how they have been addressed, and how well they are in fact delivered. Beyond that, it means having them be a visible part of phase-end decision making. At Medrad, there is a defined VOC step that defines the Marketing Requirements Document (MRD) including the definition of what a good quality linkage to the voice should be. Before that, there’s an explicit step that requires VOC planning, looking at who will be contacted, the number of visits, the use of ethnography, and other approaches. The voices underlying the MRD are also resident in the subsequent Product Requirements Specification. At Seagate Technology and International Truck, Voice of the Customer outputs are all explicitly brought into gate decisions. If they aren’t present, there is no decision to proceed.

Lesson 10-Embed listening into your corporate culture
Those that effectively and repeatedly bring the VOC into their process ultimately find that it becomes embedded in their culture. At Seagate Technology, this is further enabled by their Six Sigma-based approach to business management. One of the fundamental tenets of Six Sigma is to ground any process in the Voice of the Customer. In a culture that embraces Six Sigma, embracing the voice of the customer goes without saying. At Medrad, the relentless focus on the customer is pervasive, and was a major contributor to their winning the Malcom Baldridge award in 2003. There the question is not whether to seek the VOC or not, it is how to best and most efficiently do it. Years of investment in listening skills and listening posts pay dividends in business results that further make good listening a part of the corporate culture. At International Truck, customer listening has become part of the corporate lore as it had a great deal to do with the success of a next-generation vehicle platform recently introduced. There, listening capabilities are nurtured though training, process integration, and the setting of appropriate expectations about the time needed and the value of doing it well. In all three of these companies, senior management plays an important role by being visibly engaged, and one of many participants in active listening.

Mark J. Deck, A Director at PRTM Management Consultants, is head of its Product And Cycle-time Excellence (PACE) practice. He was PDMA president in 2002 and currently heads the PDMA Body of Knowledge project presently in progress.

References
1. The PDMA Foundation CPAS Study. Highlights may be found at www.pdma.org/visions/july04/cpas-highlights.html

2. Burchill, Gary, and Christina Hepner Brodie: Voices into Choices, Acting on the Voice of the Customer, Joiner/Oriel Publications (1997)

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