Voice of the Customer
While businesses have financial objectives, they don’t exist to make money. In “Design for Lean Six Sigma: A Holistic Approach to Design and Innovation” Rajesh Jugulum and Phillip Samuel, explain that “businesses exist to create value for their stakeholders, their primary objective translates into creating wealth for stakeholders”. The financial objectives, making money, are a result of delivering value to customers — not the other way around. A business makes a promise to customers in the form of a value proposition and then alines itself behind said promise via processes enabled by people and technology. This simple distinction, leading with the Voice of the Customer, serves as a compass that guides a successful business.
Following the Voice of the Customer sounds simple but faces the problem of measuring the abstract idea of value. So we need to break it down — value can be thought of as delivering a positive experience to customers that want to take you up on your promise. Both of these variables are not entirely in your control — they’re subjective and ultimately determined by the customer. So, a business must strive to sincerely understand its customers and their expectations -which can be broken down into different categories.
Voice of the Customer theory describes three kinds of customers: end-users (what we would traditionally think of as customers), brokers or intermediaries, and fixers or modifiers.
End users are the kind of customers that whom a product or service was primarily created for. They are the people who will ultimately be using said product or service for the value that is dominantly promised. For example, looking at the product bikes, the end-user is the customer that rides the bike.
Brokers or intermediaries are the “middlemen” that facilitate accessibility and smooth transition to end-users from producers. Although it is not a one-way street from producer to broker or intermediary to end-user, information about product or service expectations also flows back from the end-user, through the broker or intermediary, to the producer. Sticking with the example of bikes, a broker or intermediary kind of customer would be an independently owned bike store salesman.
Finally, the third kind of customer is the fixer or modifier. This customer corrects, repairs, or modifies the product or service in order to better meet the expectations of the end-users. This action can take place at any point during the product or service lifecycle. Additionally, any single customer can take the role of multiple different “customer kinds”. For example, the independent bike store salesman may also repair broken bikes for end users.
All of these different types of customers also each have three types of customer expectations — performance, perception, and outcome expectation.
Performance and perception can be grouped together as product expectations because they relate to the quality of the product or service on the producer’s end. Performance expectations are measurable expectations like weight, delivery times, and reliability measured by the mean time between failures.
Perception expectations are more difficult to measure characteristics of a product or service like the ease of use and feel. Once perception expectations have clear definitions and measurable units they can become performance expectations.
Finally, outcome expectations are the subjective view of the customer of whether or not the product or service delivers the value they expected. Another way to think about expected value is as jobs to be done. Outcome expectations can then be simplified to if the product or service successfully satisfies the customer’s job they intended the product or service to get done.
As a Service Designer, it’s important to note that Voice of the Customer is a powerful idea for orientating a business but ultimately it cannot be successful without delivering value to all stakeholders, internal and external. This is because the value delivered to customers is always co-created and thus ultimately a holistic perspective where customers are viewed within the much larger system is necessary for accurate vision and execution.
