How Should Voice Of Customer(VOC) Process be carried out for New Product Development?

The voice of the customer plays an important role in developing a new product altogether. Well, "Customers First" should be the policy in case of a new product development. As I understand the new product introduction comes from the customer demands or the customer needs. To be specific from a product marketing perspective, the VOC is a must. There can be two categories, the one being the new product introduction (NPI) solely based on the customer demand and the other being developing organization themselves to identify the market place for its new product. May be the customers wanted the product they want for so long since the existing products are not doing well for them and they (customers) need something different product that makes their life easier. In this post I am going to talk about how well a product is going to be perceived if effective VOC is carried out. This applies mainly if the customers are already using your line of products for quite a time and they wanted something different. In this case, more is expected from the customer as to how should the new product be and how the new product is going to help them.

Meet the Key Customers

The key customers are usually the ones who are using your products for sometime. They know what the existing product lacks and what they would want the new product to be. And hence identifying those customers and meeting them in person, talking to them and getting the feedback is very crucial aspect. Understand their concerns. This can effectively happen only if we see their site and realize their situations.

Collect the customer complaints/Feedback

Its true that the customers will be more than happy provide feedback on the existing products released by you if you ask them to do so. I have seen several customers feeling certain improvements in the products or doing certain things in a different way and though they know that what the product lacks they tend to live with them. This will happen mainly because they do not if the features they want in a product will considered, valued and taken forward. In my experience, certain customers had a big list of the pain points dealing with the products and when we started collecting the feedback about our product, there were huge number of feedback coming in from the customers. We felt why did we not do perform this activity little earlier. This tells that the customers will be on the edge of providing feedback, the only thing is that the we need to ask them to provide some.

Understanding the Product Deployment Scenario

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Many customers complain that they face lot of issues deploying the product in their site.  I specifically urge on this point. Without understanding how the end product is going to be deployed, I say that the product development should not even be initiated. There are different types of customers who use our products. For example, certain customers use the product in very low bandwidth of network and they might see the product performing really bad. Some customers may not even have the internet connection. It does not make sense to assume for ourselves that the customers will have all requisites for the product. Well, we can define these in the release bulletin however the all types of customers have to be considered. So the VOC must include how the customers are going to install the software and deploy that in their production sites.

Ask customers the Non-Functional aspects of the Product

The non functional aspects include what should be the performance of the existing product. And more importantly this has to be a very important input for the new product that is going to be developed. There may some frustrated customers with the slowness of the existing product. Especially the performance and capacity aspect of the product plays an important role. Dealing with a slow product takes  time and the time is the cost. Its so obvious that the customers tend to go for  better performing products. So consider what should the non functional requirements of the upcoming product from the customers. 

Getting customer feedback has to be a Continuous Process 

During the curse of developing the product, the initial VOC is not sufficient.The customer may not tell everything that they require during the first meeting with them. This can be best achieved by employing better customer oriented product development methodologies such as Agile methodology. A piece of working software product can be released to the customers for the evaluation and get the early feedback on the product. It does not make any sense to wait until the entire product is developed and then start getting the customer feedback may be during the beta release of the product. The early we get the customer feedback the better is to incorporate them in the design and implement. This is the main reason why many organizations are adapting agile development methodologies.

Transfer the VOC into QFDs (Quality Function Deployment)

All the customer feedback or opinions have to be written as product requirements. So that the corresponding test design is carried out. The test focus will have to be based on what were the customer requirements collected during the VOC meetings with the customers. As I said if the methodologies such as Agile are being followed, the initial product requirements, design needs to be changed so that the corresponding test design gets changed.

 Conclusion

These are just few examples of how effectively VOC has to be carried out. There could be several such items. These will vary based on the kind of the product and kind of customers we are dealing with.  As I have been highlighting the fact that the customer needs have to be understood in the first place during VOC. Any gaps doing so will lead to bad feedback on the product by the same customers that you met. The key challenge is that the customers may not explain each and every thing that they wanted but they can tell them at very high level. Its the responsibility of VOC team to dig deeper into those and ask as much information as they can to make a new product to be successfully accepted our customers.