What is Voice of Customers? Every business in any type of industry has its own targeted customer and audience. Voice of the Customer is how company take note and listen to customer’s feedback or testimonial about their brand, product or services. Voice of Customer (VOC) is also customer’s voicing out their opinion, expectations, preferences of a product or service. The data taken from the surveys done by the company is very useful and valuable, this is because instead of collecting data Voice of Customer is a making sure you as the business owner understand the data. If you know customers have concern or problems towards the products or services your company provided, it is your goal to get to the root of it and find the root cause of the problem. On the other side, if you know your customer enjoy and like your product, you should also want to find out why, so you can expand on it to ensure customer’s delightfulness on the product or services are continuous.
By collecting data through Voice of Customer, you as a business owner can engage with the customers at every touchpoint in the customer journey in using your products. Voice of Customer helps you in identifying early warning and potential crisis that may cause more variants in your products/services. It is also to evaluate new concepts, ideas and solutions to the variants that may happened in the near future. Not only that, by collecting data using Voice of Customer, you can come up with new invention or customize your products, services and add new features to meet the needs and wants of your customers.
Applying Voice of Customers in operation
Voice of Customer is very important in any type of business industry. It is to make sure you as a business owner to know when to make improvements.
The famous fashion mogul and influencer in Malaysia is the founder of an e-commerce platform for local designers promoting their clothes. The couple have been implemented Voice of Customers and been engaging with their loyal customers very well, asking for their opinion every time they want to launch a product. For example, back in 2020 during the first MCO, they have created a website and the main purpose is to create virtual Ramadhan Bazaar to help small stalls and local food businesses to continue selling home-made local desserts or other foods virtually on the website since the physical Ramadhan Bazaar was not allowed last year. They open up a Q&A session on their social media, asking for opinion from the user and vendors on the improvements they should make since it is their first time doing this. They received tons of feedbacks from the user and the vendors in order to give the best virtual Ramadhan Bazaar experience to the users. Now, they are back with the virtual Ramadhan Bazaar 2021 with more vendors and tons of food choices for people to indulge in authentic and delicious foods for breaking fast with a better version of website interface compared to last year.
Another example from our local entrepreneur is an award winner product local cosmetic. This award winner brand is a vegan and cruelty free cosmetics, solely made in Malaysia. Over the years, this brand has evolved very quickly and be one of the most popular local cosmetics amongst the public regardless of their age. Before they launched their product called Microphone Foundation, the founder opens up a Q&A session on her Instagram account asking her followers of how many foundation shades they should come up with this collection. As a result, they have launched 15 shades of foundations ranging from the fairest to the darkest colours. This is because, they want their products to cater to all types of skin colour especially local Asian girls. Not only that, they also have been engaging with their users on their opinions of the newly launched products and they are also very transparent with the complaints received about their cosmetics. As a result, this brand is now one of the best local cosmetics that we have in the local scene and they have won several awards.
Methods of collecting Voice of Customers
There are three most common methods used for gathering proactive customer data in Voice of Customer. Which are focus groups, surveys and interviews.
Focus group
Focus group in Voice of Customer is a useful method where the information is focusing on the behavior that are complex than a survey. Focus group is usually done in over one-on-one interviews to require in depth and unbiased information for the project, by doing this you can see the honesty of feedback by the customer. This method is also to gain insights into the prioritization of needs, to test concepts and get feedback from the customer. Not only that, the organize information from the collective point of view of a group of customers representing.
Survey
Survey is to collect Voice of Customer data for targeted participants whom already have used, tested or experienced your products and services. There are many reasons why a project team would like to communicate with their customers, it is because it may help them to evaluate the customer’s perception and opinion of the products and services which are still in the first stage of evaluation in the Lean Six Sigma project and the impact of the project towards customer satisfaction. Survey is also a method that prioritize customer needs or if there is an improvement that should be done. Not only that, it is also to efficiently gather considerable amount of information from a large population, to make it easier for the project team. It is also to measure the importance of performance against an attribute or customer characteristic.
Interviews
Other methods that can be used in collecting Voice of Customer is interview. This method is to clarify findings, to get ideas and suggestions or to test ideas with customers. It is also to clarify points or to better understand why a particular issue is important to customers. Interview is also to learn what is important to customers, which supports the development of hypotheses about customer needs. As it is crucial to have a direct one-on-one conversation with the customers, so that a project team can evaluate their feedbacks and see the customers genuine opinion. The interview can ask both open and closed ended questions such as; ‘tell us how you use our product/service? ‘What are the barriers you when with the product/service?
There are always ups and downs when running a business whether you are the owner, stakeholder or even just an executive in the company. All of these people play vital roles in making sure the data collected for the Voice of Customers is transparent as be taken seriously. It is very important to know what are the public’s opinion on our products to always innovate and come up with plan B to improve our products and services. Hence, why Lean Six Sigma is always about cutting off waste and continuously improving to ensure the customers are satisfied with the end product. If you wish to learn more about Lean Six Sigma and how it helps your company and its stakeholders to reducing waste in the production, do visit our website https://mbizm.com/ and contact us to speak with our representative at +603 7873 8485.