Voice of Customer in Business Markets

What Is This Thing Called VOC, and Why Is It Different From What You Think?

The concept of listening to the Voice of the Customer has been around for more than 20 years now, and has been empirically shown to be a clear “best practice” in new product development. Yet VOC is still too often misunderstood, misused, and poorly executed. True VOC is not just any kind of market research, and it is definitely not just asking the customer what they want! This highly regarded course, taught by one of the most experienced experts in the field today, will set things straight and teach you how to gather, analyze, and effectively use VOC in your own new product and service development initiatives.

Recommended for:

People involved in new product development, including team members from marketing, market research, engineering, R&D, sales, and product management— virtually anyone charged with the development of new products and/or services in a business-to-business setting, and who are in need of a better understanding of their customers’ wants and needs.

Course Overview

• Why You Should Listen to Customers
• Correctly Defining the Voice of the Customer
• How Voice of the Customer Fits Into the Product / Service Development Process

Designing the Interview Process

• Who to Interview – Designing a Sample
• Where and How to Interview Them – Focus Groups vs. One-on-Ones and Ethnography

Observation

• Logistics of Interviewing – Recruitment, Facilities, Technology
• Writing the Interview Guide

How to Interview Customers

• Introducing the Interview
• Active Listening
• Probing – Getting Past Generalities Like “Durable”, “Good Quality” , and “Easy to Use”
• Role-playing and Practice Interviewing

Analyzing the Interviews

• Transcribing, Highlighting, and Winnowing
• Needs vs. Solutions, Engineering Characteristics, Target Values, and Opinions

Organizing and Prioritizing What Customers Say

• Affinitizing Customer Needs
• Importance vs. Performance

What You Can Do With Voice of the Customer Information

• Avoiding the Pitfalls

Translating The Voice of the Customer into Product and Service Design Specifications using QFD

 

Translating the Voice of the Customer into New Features and Solutions

• Traditional vs. Web-based Brainstorming and Ideation
• Concept and Prototype Evaluation

Gerry Katz

Vice Chairman, Applied Marketing Science

Gerry Katz is a recognized authority in the areas of new product development, design of new services, process innovation, and market research, with more than 40 years of consulting experience. At Applied Marketing Science, he has led more than 300 major client engagements employing the Voice of the Customer (VOC), Quality Function Deployment (QFD), and a large number of other strategic marketing science applications. His client engagements have covered a wide variety of industries, with particular emphasis on healthcare, medical technology, and commercial / industrial products. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA), the world’s leading professional society devoted to the study and practice of developing and commercializing new products and services. He is also certified as a New Product Development Professional (NPDP) and is a senior contributing editor to Visions Magazine.

He is the author of several award-winning papers, and received the William O’Dell Prize from the American Marketing Association in 1988. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Product Innovation Management, The European Management Journal, The Journal of Marketing Research, Interfaces, PDMA Visions, and Quirk’s Marketing Research Review. Gerry is a highly sought-after speaker at both public and private conferences on Voice of the Customer, innovation, new product development, and the design of new services.  He is a highly regarded teacher, trainer and coach, and has lectured frequently at the business schools of MIT (Sloan), the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), Dartmouth (Tuck), Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, Northeastern, and Harvard University. Gerry has appeared twice on the NBC Today Show and in The Wall Street Journal. His outside interests are in music and education, and he has served on a number of Committees and Boards of Directors at a range of institutions, including the University of Rochester, the Eastman School of Music, the Longy School of Music, and the Boston Higashi School.

Gerry received his B.S. in management science from the University of Rochester in 1970 and his S.M. in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1972.

For open enrollment seminars:
Up to 30 days prior: No fee
Between 15 – 30 days: $100 fee
14 days or less: Full seminar fee
All substitutions within 14 days prior to the seminar will be subject to a $50 administrative fee.