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Total Quality Management
Notes products, participating in focus groups or rotating development personnel through marketing,
sales, or customer support functions. This direct involvement provides a better understanding
of customer needs, the customer environment, and product use; develops greater empathy on
the part of product development personnel, minimizes hidden knowledge, overcomes technical
arrogance, and provides a better perspective for development decisions. These practices have
resulted in fundamental insights such as engineers of highly technical products recognizing the
importance to customers of ease of use and durability rather than the latest technology.
Where a company has a direct relationship with a very small number of customers, it is desirable
to have a customer representative(s) on the product development team.
!
Caution Mechanisms such as focus groups should be used where there are a larger number
of customers to insure on-going feedback over the development cycle.
During customer discussions, it is essential to identify the basic customer needs. Frequently,
customers will try to express their needs in terms of HOW the need can be satisfied and not in
terms of WHAT the need is. This limits consideration of development alternatives. Development
and marketing personnel should ask WHY until they truly understand what the root need is.
Breakdown general requirements into more specific requirements by probing what is needed.
Challenge, question and clarify requirements until they make sense. Document situations and
circumstances to illustrate a customer need. Address priorities related to each need. Not all
customer needs are equally important. Use ranking and paired comparisons to aid to prioritizing
customer needs. Fundamentally, the objective is to understand how satisfying a particular need
influences the purchase decision.
Self Assessment
Fill in the blanks:
7. The voice of the customer is a process used to capture the ………………… from the customer.
8. Product development personnel need to be directly involved in understanding
…………………… needs.
9. Where a company has a direct relationship with a very small number of customers, it is
desirable to have a …………………… on the product development team.
10. …………………… customers are the first source of information if the product is aimed at
current market.
11.5 Organization of Information
Once customer needs are gathered, they then have to be organized. The mass of interview notes,
requirements documents, market research, and customer data needs to be distilled into a handful
of statements that express key customer needs. Affinity diagramming is a useful tool to assist
with this effort. Brief statements which capture key customer needs are transcribed onto cards.
A data dictionary which describes these statements of needs is prepared to avoid any
misinterpretation. These cards are organized into logical groupings or related needs. This will
make it easier to identify any redundancy and serves as a basis for organizing the customer
needs.
!
Caution In addition to “stated” or “spoken” customer needs, “unstated” or “unspoken”
needs or opportunities should be identified.
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