Validation - Voice of the Customer

Geoff Anderson back for another Leaders' Blog session for the Technology Marketing Center, and I am honored to have the first post of 2011. As I have commented in the past, I get my ideas from a variety of Muses.  This post came from an exchange on Twitter.  I follow several people, and a few hashtags, and the idea for this post came from people I follow as part of the #prodmgmt community.  A tweet came across lamenting senior management team members who use a Henry Ford quote to question the value of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) exercises.  Since it didn't identify the quote, several of my peers jumped in, guessing things like "Any color - so long as it is black" as the quote.  Naturally the original poster was referring to the quote: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

Not that I am gloating about knowing the intent of the original reference, but I have been in the position of defending validation exercises from senior executives who share this opinion of VoC.  I suspect that this attitude of dismissal of the value also exists as startups.  Unfortunately, as marketers, I suspect that we have done this to ourselves.  Raise your hand if:

• You have ever done a validation effort that you consciously or unconsciously biased the discussion guide to validate your personal beliefs
• Your questions have not been truly open ended - 
• You have cheated out and gone to a packaged survey to avoid the travel (and expense) of a full VoC (or was unable to secure the funding from management)
• You have cherry picked VoC targets that you know to be friendly/in your camp

Has anyone not raised their hand?  I know that I have done some quick and dirty validations and voice of the customer work that had shortcuts.  However, I was aware of the biases and made sure to account for this in my reporting.  Unfortunately once you get in this rut, it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult to secure buy in from senior management.  

I firmly believe that if your VoC efforts result in conclusions like the Henry Ford quote above, you have failed to ask the right questions. Perhaps if Ford had followed up the question with the series of "why" questions we learned about in the MTP course, he would have gotten to the downsides of horse based travel (i.e. Distance per day, how to feed the horse en route, the fact that there are some places that you can't get a horse to go, the limits to what a single or train of horses can pull, ...), and thus learned what the unmet need was.  I find that in a detailed Voice of the Customer or Validation exercise that the true value is the tangential directions that the discussions go down, and the structured debriefing process after the interview.   

Another path to increasing the value to, and buy in from, senior executives is to include them in the process.  At the front end, keep them in the loop when developing the discussion guide.  Run through the practice sessions (you do practice before hitting the road, right?) with them.  Have them be the "sponsor" and kick off the VoC sessions when you are live with customers.  Keep them as an observer during the session (and make sure that they are in "listen ONLY" mode during the visit).  I have never had an executive feel that this was not useful to them, and worth their time (caveat - I usually call upon Directors or group VP's for this role, not the CxO level.  YMMV)

While I can't guarantee that this will lead to success, it will add some sunlight to a crucial marketing process that some executives will naturally doubt its efficacy.  Usually all it takes to make a convert for life is for a successful VoC that uncovers a product concept, or an unmet need to be exploited.

Do you have any real world experiences to share?  If so, be sure post to the comments below.

Until next time, Happy Marketing!

 

Comments

[Chris Halliwell]

Thanks for the thoughtful post Geoff. The professionalism and quality control that delivers the payoff in listening to customers is mysteriously and seriously underrated. The comment I have is your 4th bullet on sample bias. This luddite attitude about customer needs was unfortunately reinforced by an, I hope, incorrect reading of the Innovator’s Dilemma. That is, people who buy horses are not the people to ask about engine-driven locomotion, maybe people who ride in stagecoaches would be better. So the trick becomes finding the correct SUBSTITUTE (i.e. indirect competitive alternative) market and asking the unsolved problems questions with the right sampling methodology. My 2 cents...