Management Consulting and Training - International Management Technologies, Inc.
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Courses > VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER TIMES 12: How to uncover, translate and deliver what customers want
-- Course Outline --
You’d never tolerate multiple answers to the math problem, 7+5=X. We’ve had years of math training, but little or none in linguistics. The ambiguity of our language and weak linguistic discipline remains a largely untouched challenge. This course supplies the needed rigor. You’ll see how both improvement and innovation opportunities become unavoidably obvious.
Success in challenging times is more dependent than ever on understanding the voice of the customer and delivering what customers want. But the well-meaning notion that we should listen to the voice of the customer is an insult to our intelligence. Everyone knows there is no such thing as the customer. This necessarily means there must be more than one voice to listen to. There are actually 12 voices that traditional VOC methods don't identify. We can make potentially fatal assumptions about (1) who “the customers” really are, (2) what questions to ask, (3) how to prioritize their answers and (4) how to define and measure success.
Your organization is not alone in this challenge. Consider the top car company executive who heard customers say they wanted more miles per tank of gas. Did this understanding lead to (a) fuel efficient engines, (b) lighter vehicles, (c) aerodynamic bodies or (d) bigger gas tanks? The firm’s design team rushed to market with bigger gas tanks. No kidding!
If it’s this hard to get it right with widgets, the challenge in service is even greater. The executive’s competition, who used the methods you’ll learn in this session, is quoted under ATTENDEE COMMENTS below.
Tools such as surveys, quality function deployment (QFD), the Kano model, ISO 9000, Six Sigma and others have been increasingly used to capture the voice of the customer (VOC). While they have all made contributions, NONE answer key questions every practitioner must answer. Naturally, this workshop provides those answers.
The firm that lost a $400 billion contract (that’s right, with a “b”), referenced in this presentation, is simply one more scenario of what can go wrong when interpreting customer priorities. On the other hand, examples from government, healthcare and such recognizable firms as Starbucks, Amazon.com, Southwest Airlines, Honda, Motorola and Google illustrate the growth potential possible by using the easy-to-understand but rigorous methodology described in this session.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Don’t even think about conducting a voice of the customer project, commissioning a satisfaction survey or designing new services without the innovative framework and tools provided in this session. You’ll learn a refreshing new way to uncover and translate the mind of the customer in ways you never thought possible, including how to:
- Create the strategic framework for your voice of the customer initiative
- Consider the 7 most common ways to collect customer needs
- Avoid the ten most frequent failures of satisfaction surveys
- Determine who your customers really are in every context
- Ask the three “word formulas” that always uncover priorities
- Identify the 12 Voices you could hear and why to distinguish them from each other
- Translate squishy perceptions into objective measures and innovative alternatives
- Connect customer satisfaction, product design and growth
OUTLINE
- The practices most often used to understand the voice of the customer
- Why surveys fail and the essential keys to success
- The four dimensions of excellence customers want satisfied
- The specific steps to uncover customer priorities
- “Word formulas” you didn’t learn in school, as powerful as mathematical equations
- How to distinguish performance, perception and outcome expectations and why it matters
- How to define service and knowledge work as concrete, tangible and measurable
- The three roles a customer can play, and which tends to have most power
- How to translate fuzzy perceptions into objective performance measures
- Cases of how this methodology has resulted in better than 20-to-1 ROI
You award-winning facilitator will be Robin Lawton. He uses humor, a highly interactive teaching style and cross-industry examples to illustrate what is possible for your organization to achieve.
This workshop/facilitated session may be offered as a keynote, online seminar or workshop customized to your organization. The length normally ranges from 2 hours to 4 days, depending on the specific results you want to achieve.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
This course is intended for executive leadership, the change agents who will help to focus and deploy your Voice of the Customer, new product design (NPD), service leadership and innovation initiative(s).
ATTENDEE COMMENTS
Excellent program! This is not ‘soft’ training but challenged me to make a mind shift to apply the customer-centered thinking to my work. The emphasis on creative divergent thinking may be the key to our success in the next ten years. Steve McAlexander, AVP, American Honda
This session is definitely NOT for the faint-hearted! Robin Lawton led us through an intensive, fast-paced presentation designed to reframe how we think about customer satisfaction. He encouraged each participant to continually challenge how we think about ‘products’ and our role in providing these to our real customers. He provided a very clear understanding of what a customer-centered culture is and how to create one.
Hazel Mays, Quality Manager, AT&T Global Business Communications Systems
For more information about this course, contact us.
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