VOC = what the customer means, not necessarily what they say

Chris Bohrson signing in for week #3…….

 

If you recall from my entry last week, the TMC case outlines that the business we were in supplied complex hardware/software systems to phone companies for testing their vast copper phone networks. This business was in decline so we needed a new source of revenue that leveraged our core competencies. 

 

To determine how to proceed we decided to launch a fairly exhaustive and structured voice of the customer process: 

• First we decided that this effort had to be jointly staffed by Engineering and Marketing. Our definition of “marketing” really meant the Product Manager who we thought of as the “Product CEO”. I’ll leave the discussion and debate on what a product manager does or should do to another time since some believe the term “Product CEO” to be too broad.   As you can tell, I like the term. 

• Next we carefully chose customer types. This included our traditional customers as well as other types of network providers; like ISPs and backbone providers. We also targeted a range of functional groups within these customers that spanned the network life cycle. For example, we wanted to target network designers, those involved in service provisioning and people involved in service assurance. We also selected users, designers, managers, marketing people, and senior executives. 

• Next we put together a discussion guide. We then practiced asking open-ended questions followed by probing. This exercise made us all realize how poor we really were at understanding the root issues that customers were concerned about. For example, when asked, many customers say “just deliver me feature XYZ”.  As we all know, sometimes it is appropriate to just deliver XYZ as the need is obvious. Other times, it pays to keep asking what the problem is they are trying to solve and to dig into the underlying “pain”. This is of course easy to say and hard to get everyone to do as most of us are trained to simply transcribe what the customer says. I use the term “pain” here because a wise man once told me that pain flows through an organization and companies will spend money to alleviate pain. So, we wanted to find it!

• On the interviews themselves, we made sure every interview was conducted by at least two people. The reason for two was to have one asking questions and one taking notes.  Also, to span both functions we tried to always have one interviewer from engineering and one from marketing.  Both were listening for underlying issues – that is, why the customer wanted a certain capability, what pain was associated with that and what economic benefit would they derive if the pain were resolved. Finally, we interviewed our own sales and services teams as well. These folks were ecstatic to do this as we had never asked them before in any kind of structured way what they thought. 

• From this we translated our notes to affinity diagrams.  This allowed us to synthesize the results from the interviews. The affinity diagrams also helped us identify various markets of opportunity.  As an aside, I am sure the waitress in that diner in Wisconsin thought we were an odd couple (the word geek comes to mind) as we used the wall beside our table to do the affinity diagram using post-it notes.

The result of the VOC work was a couple of critical conclusions:

1. First, we realized that phone companies were banking on leveraging their phone networks to sell DSL. While this was a real “no brainer” the important realization was that they had very poor service provisioning systems. This was not obvious to many phone companies as this was a latent requirement.  Therein was our opportunity! 
2. Second, the VOC process helped us undercover the desire of one large phone company to be an early adopter. They had attempted to deploy ISDN as a consumer product as the first attempt at broadband Internet access. This was much less successful than anticipated. So, they were looking for someone to work with to ensure a more successful launch of DSL.

Next week I’ll focus on decisions we made based on this work and some of the skill issues we had to address moving forward including adjustments we made to our product focus to achieve a better whole product as in our first try we did not get it quite right. 

 

Otherwise, have a great week.