What does VOC (voice of the customer) mean?

Commentary from Jeff Thompson, PDMA Pittsburgh Chapter President

 As a product development professional who came up through the marketing organization, I often think about topics in that area and how we might get better. 

Recently I was thinking about the statement “voice of the customer”.   In developing products all of us understand the importance of capturing great voice of customer (VOC) data.   I suspect if we got into a room we would have great alignment that customer understanding was a critical input to the product development process.

But what does VOC mean?   I believe we hurt ourselves when we call it “voice”; in reality if we limit ourselves to customer’s verbal expression we miss much, if not most, of the understanding we need to succeed.   If I got a do over I’d never call it “voice”; rather something more like achieving a deep understanding of the customer.  I think Clayton Christensen had a great perspective when he spoke of understanding the jobs customers are seeking to accomplish.  Wow, that reframes VOC for me.   Many customers don’t completely understand what they are trying to accomplish at a big picture level; they understand their small piece.  Even then, we know when we ask people about what they do it rarely agrees with observation.

So does calling it VOC hurt us?   I think it does.   How many of our executive team members and key project team members think they have great customer understanding from speaking with a few customers on a topic?  Worse yet, how many partial data sets do we forward, or allow to be forwarded, which are really fragments of a comprehensive effort.  We even reinforce spoken statements in those slide decks in which we put the cute picture of our customer with the quote or sound bite they gave us.    Ouch, it hurts to write this.

I guess if we really let the cat out of the bag and spoke about VOC being a series of well designed and carefully executed experiments our teams would suddenly hold us to that.  And maybe they should.  

I certainly don’t profess to have the answers; actually I’m pretty convinced I’m destined to be a lifelong learner.  So I am really excited that Gerry Katz will be in Pittsburgh on April 18 speaking to the Pittsburgh Chapter of PDMA on VOC; I’ve got a lot to learn!

Jeffrey J. Thompson  
PDMA Pittsburgh Chapter President
McKesson Corporation

Director, Innovation Programs
Marketing and Product Management

Registration is open for the upcoming April 18th event:  http://bit.ly/VOCInn

Follow the event live on Twitter @PDMApittsburgh #HijackingVOC