Eight Methods of Determining the Voice of the Customer: Advantages and Disadvantages
Promoting quality in the context of entrepreneurship is a crucial step toward gaining success and becoming a leader in the target industry. For these purposes, an increase in customer satisfaction rates and the subsequent increase in the number of clients is essential.
However, the failure to hear the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and determining the requirements set by the target audience is likely to result in the untimely demise of an organization. Despite the eight tools that are traditionally isolated as the means of defining the VoC in the environment of a certain market cannot be deemed as impeccable, the focus on the general tendencies in the target market is what makes it rather efficient for locating the essential strategies in the area of product branding, design, marketing approaches, pricing, etc.
Ethnographic research allows for embracing a variety of issues and touching upon a range of subjects (Groebner, Shannon, Fry, & Smith, 2014). However, one must admit that it lacks communicating with clients actively. Instead, it relies heavily on the statistical data, therefore, quantifying what needs to stay qualitative information.
Customer-visit teams might be viewed as perfect. Indeed, direct communication with the target audience is always essential to improving the quality of the end product. However, the choice of the audience may turn out to be biased, therefore, jeopardizing the veracity of the results.
Customer focus groups, in their turn, provide information produced in a rather natural environment. Therefore, the data can be viewed as rather accurate. Nevertheless, similarly to the previous instance, there might be a research bias as a relatively short number of people cannot possibly represent the entire population.
The customer design can be deemed as rather efficient as it allows customizing the product by the needs of a particular individual. However, the identified approach also has its problems since it is rather new and, therefore, needs more thorough testing (Cooper & Dreher, 2010).
Customer brainstorming could be interpreted as a rather efficient tool for hearing VoC. The ideas that clients bring up as a result of creating associative arrays are a direct effect of working with the customers’ subconscious. Nevertheless, the brainstorming process does not involve careful and elaborate data processing stage completed by clients. Therefore, some of the results that it will bring are likely to be farfetched or even false.
Eventually, the significance of creating a community of enthusiasts should be listed among the primary tools for hearing VoC. While offering rather accurate results and being able to represent the opinions of numerous types of customers, a community of enthusiasts requires a lot of time to be built. Moreover, it will be necessary to encourage people to participate. As a result, a radical change in the company’s policy will be required (Eight steps to great customer experiences for government agencies, 2012).
While providing a company with mostly general information about the target customers and being aimed at identifying large tendencies in the target market, the eight methods of locating the VoC in the environment of a specific market, be it a local or a global one, leads to rather impressive results. It helps determine the essential requirements set by the target audience, as well as avoid making crucial mistakes that people in question may view as the ultimate failure. As a result, the research principles listed above can and should be adopted by any company operating in the global market.
Reference List
Cooper, R. G., & Dreher, A. (2010). Voice-of-customer methods: What is the best source for new product ideas? Web.
Eight steps to great customer experiences for government agencies. (2012). Web.
Groebner, D. F., Shannon, P. W., Fry, P. C., & Smith, K. D. (2014). In Business statistics: A decision-making approach (9th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.