Acquiring, Processing, and Deploying: Voice of the Customer

Shillito, M. Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1574442902 ISBN 13: 9781574442908

Publisher: CRC Press, 2000

Do you want a better understanding of who your customers are? Do you want to learn how to acquire the customer voice? The next decade will be the decade of the customer. Meeting their wants, needs, and desires better than anyone else will be paramount to your organization's success. Acquiring, Processing, and Deploying Voice of the Customer gives you the tools you need to develop a Voice of the Customer (VOC) plan from beginning to end.

Shillito describes the delicate customer-company balance. He covers the various components types of VOC such as voice of the company, voice of the designer/engineer, and voice of marketing that must be integrated through the use of an interdisciplinary team to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage for the enterprise. The author not only discusses VOC but also includes a hybrid model - Customer Oriented Product Concepting (COPC) - for deploying VOC into a product or service design that balances the needs of the customer with the needs of the enterprise.

All of these elements go into developing a successful VOC process. However, timing is key. Shillito presents a step-by-step template for integrating VOC into the fuzzy front end of the commercialization process. He demonstrates how product development teams can get an early focus and stay on course during the commercialization process. The book provides a set of breakthrough tools that may be used to obtain and deploy VOC.

The most comprehensive VOC guide available, Acquiring, Processing, and Deploying Voice of the Customer provides you with the techniques required to shape a product or service so that their elements balance customer and company needs while being affordable to both. It describes qualitative and quantitative processes integrated into a system to determine the customer's wants and how you can meet them. The new methods found in this book will put you ahead of your competition and ahead of the crowd.

Review:

Understanding customers' needs and wants is a key success factor for new product commercialization. The techniques described in this book enable the distillation of customer data into information useful to the product development team. Having used many of these techniques, I have found them to be best applied in the earliest stages of product planning and development and significantly enhance the effectiveness of other Best Practices such as Value Engineering, Design for X and FMEA.-Chris Tsai, Project Manager, Six Sigma Black Belt, Eastman Kodak Company