Collect Customer Data

The first thing the team members should do after the kickoff is to identify all of the customers who will be affected by your project. Once they have done that, they will then determine those customers’ needs and expecta-tions (critical requirements).

It’s crucial to do this right: it’s the basis for the whole project. Do the CTQs wrong and it doesn’t matter how well you do everything else.

There was a famous problem solver named Dorian Shainin who would say, “You need to talk to the part to get the information you need.”

What he meant was that you need to talk to the process or really observe the defects. In the Six Sigma world, this method is known as “Be the Customer”: you step into the shoes of the process, part, or transaction to understand and observe what really goes on from that point of view. It’s the old Caddyshack line about golfing: “Just be the ball, be the ball, be the ball.”

Capturing and translating the customer’s needs is critical to ensuring the Define phase focus for each development project. This includes decid-ing how to identify end customers and which customers to contact in order to capture their requirements. As customers are identified, suitable techniques are used to assemble the Voice of the Customer (VOC), telling us what customers value.

Team Members

Figure 6-2.Sample RACI chart

Critical requirements (aka crit-ical-to-quality requirements, CTQs) The features or per-formance characteristics that are most important to cus-tomers.

VOC means listening to what your customers are telling you they care about. It is customer requirements as defined by the customer, not by marketing or sales or manufacturing or a manager.

For example, I was taking my family on a drive to drop my son off at a YMCA mountain camp and my mother said, “I wish they would let me design the air conditioner for cars because those men designers have never taken the loudness into consideration!” The voice of that customer was that air conditioner volume was an important characteristic!

There is no monolithic voice of the customer. Customer voices are diverse. In consumer markets, there are a variety of needs. Even within one buying unit, there are multiple customer voices (e.g., children and parents). This also applies to industrial and government markets. There are even multiple customer voices within a single organization.

How do you collect this valuable VOC data? There are many ways.

Here are two common approaches:

1. Use existing data, such as customer complaints 2. Gather new data

In general, existing data is OK to use as a baseline or to get a general sense of the context of the problem. But you should never base decisions solely on old data. You have to gather new VOC data directly related to the problem or issue you’re studying.

So, how do you gather data about your customers? Here are some options:

• Telephone survey

• Mail survey

• Focus group, either online or in person

• One-on-one interviews

• Intercept interviews (on the street, for example)

• Observation of the customer using the product or service

The first options on this list—telephone and mail surveys—are best used to gather a lot of quantitative information quickly, such as when you want to verify the demand for a particular service or feature. They work

well when you use close-ended questions, those with just a few options from which respondents choose.

Focus groups and interviews are better used for qualitative data, when you ask open-ended questions and cus-tomers can respond any way they want. Observation is the preferred method if you’re involved in designing or redesigning a product or service, because often customers can’t put their needs or frustrations into words, so surveys or interviews won’t get you the kind of information you need.

Here are some questions you need to answer no matter what type of data you’re going to collect:

1. How will we collect the information?

2. What data do we need?

3. Where is the end customer going to use the product or service?

4. When is the end customer going to use the product or service?

5. How will we use the information?

6. What customer problem are we trying to solve?

Whatever method(s) you choose, be sure to follow these guidelines:

• If you can’t contact all the customers affected by the project, make sure the sample you choose is representative of the entire customer segment or population.

• Select participants at random.

• Close-ended survey questions should be objective and easily con-verted into quantitative data.

• In focus groups and interviews, you will likely use mostly open-ended questions, but you may want to include a few close-open-ended sur-vey-type questions so you’ll have some quantitative results as well.

Close-ended question

Question for which the answers are limited to selecting from a list (options A to E, “don’t care” to “care a lot,” etc.).

Survey questions are typically close-ended.

Open-ended question

Question for which there is no predefined set of answers.

Customers are free to answer any way they choose, using any words they choose.