SUMMARY
Undeniably, the customers steer your business processes. Understanding what your customers want—and how their needs, requirements, and attitudes change over time—will require a combination of discipline, persistence, creativity, sensitivity, science, and sometimes, luck.
Defining customer requirements involves three activities:
For your VOC (Voice of the Customer) system to be effective, you need to make it a constant priority and focus. You have to be able to clearly define your “customers.” Successful companies are getting cleverer at aligning their products and services, also their costs, with the “profile” of their varied customers. Others focus their efforts on serving the customers whose needs best match their company’s strategy. Avoid the Squeaky Wheel Syndrome. Listen to both good and bad feedback from customers. The key is to balance and diversify your efforts to learn from a variety of groups: current, happy customers, current, unhappy customers (including those who complain and those who don’t), lost customers, competitor’s customers, and prospective customers. Use a broad array of methods to know your customer. The best system is to mix both traditional and new methods.
| Traditional... | New Generation... |
|---|---|
| ? surveys | ? targeted & multi-level interviews & survey |
| ? focus groups | ? customer scorecards |
| ? interviews | ? customer scorecards |
| ? formalized complaint system | ? data warehousing & data mining |
| ? market research | ? customer/supplier “audits” |
| ? shopper programs | ? quality function deployment |
Your methods should seek specific data and watch trends. Again you should be able to balance your key specific data as well as the “big picture” that will help you develop accurate standards to measure your market performance. This may include educating your customers since some of them may not know how to define their own needs. Once you have all the data or information, use it! Disseminate it to both your internal and external customers.
To get the real voice of the customer is not easy. That is why you need to develop performance standards and requirements statements. The initial step is to differentiate critical categories of requirements.
The output requirements are the features/characteristics of the final product or service that you deliver to your customer at the end of the process.
The service requirements are guidelines on how you should treat your customers during the business process.
Example:
| Service Requirements | Output Requirements | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Process | Typical Req’ts | Output | Typical Req’ts |
| Auto Sale/Purchase Process | ? Prompt Attention (<2 min) ? Lack of pressure (check with customer every 10 min) ? Ability to test drive (all cars available to exit lot) |
Automobile | ? Engine starts in .5 seconds ? Gas mileage equal to or better than rated ? Door locks operate properly |
A Requirement Statement is a brief but thorough description of the performance standard established for an Output or Service encounter. Some guidelines on how to compose them.
Establish some goals. An effective Requirement Statement will do the following:
a. link to a specific Output or “Moment of Truth.”
b. describe a single performance criterion or factor.
c. be expressed using observable and/or measurable factors.
d. enable to establish a level of “acceptable” or not “acceptable” performance.
e. be detailed but concise
f. match—or be validated by—the Voice of the Customer
| Poorly Written: | Well-Written: |
|---|---|
| Rapid delivery. | Orders delivered within three working days of Purchase Order receipt. (POs must be received by 3 P.M.) |
| Treat all patients like family. [This is fine as a guiding principle, but not as a requirement statement.] | * Greet patients within 20 seconds of entry into waiting area. * Address all patients by “Mr.” or “Ms.” and last name. * Address patients by first name if permission is given by the patient. |
| Liberal returns policy. | Any returned item retailing for less than $200 accepted with no questions and with full cash refund. |
Once you have established parameters on how to compose Requirement Statements, it is now time to analyze and prioritize customer requirements and link them to your strategy.
A growing number of companies are now using the model based on the work of Noriaki Kano, a Japanese engineer and consultant. The “Kano analysis” groups customer requirements into three categories.
COMMENTARY
It used to be that quality refers to the physical attribute of a product. The advent of TQM and Six Sigma redefined it. Today, the customer defines quality. And his definition is based on whether the product or service meets his requirements. It is therefore paramount that you must understand what your customers really want.
This chapter clearly discussed the aspects of determining customer requirements. The various methods and sources of customer give an idea on how and where to get customer data, which traditionally was believed to be difficult to get. The steps discuss a simple guide to process and finalize the requirement statements.
However, it would have been better had this step been made Step 1. In other words, how will you know what processes to undertake if you haven’t yet known what your customer needs.
