Silence the Voice of the Customer

By: Tony Ulwick

Innovation is successful when it targets customers’ needs, but how sure can we be that this is something we can predict effectively? In this article Tony Ulwick argues that the traditional voice of the customer methodology is the wrong tool to determine customer needs. Tony presents an alternative methodology that makes it possible to determine all the needs of a given customer group.

Innovation is successful when it targets customers’ needs, and yet nearly 90% of those polled in a recent IIR webinar survey reported that they had never worked on a new product in their entire career in which all the customer’s needs were known. Experts in the voice-of-the-customer (VOC) innovation technique shrug their shoulders when confronted with such facts. They say that customers do not know all their needs; customers have latent needs and needs they cannot articulate; their needs change quickly over time. We beg to differ. It is possible to know all the needs of a given customer group—it’s just that VOC has a misconception about needs, and, more fundamentally, it’s the wrong tool for the job.

Over the past 20 years we at Strategyn have created and refined an innovation process with an 86% success rate—more than four times better than the 10%–30% success rate that VOC practitioners must content themselves with.

To be fair, our method does share some points with VOC. Like VOC, our method recognizes that:

• Innovation and new product development must be guided by an understanding of customer needs.
• To be successful at understanding customer needs, you need a structured process.
• Customer needs are distinct from the solutions that address those needs.
• It is not the customer’s job to come up with solutions; it is the developer’s job.

But the traditional VOC approach fails and is unsuited for innovation for several reasons:

• It relies on an incorrect understanding of customer needs.
• It does not have a suitable framework for capturing customer needs.
• It holds—incorrectly—that customers have latent needs and needs they cannot articulate.
• It holds—also incorrectly—that customer needs change quickly over time.
• It does not offer the degree of specificity required to enable clear and actionable innovation.

But even more fundamentally, VOC is flawed as a tool for innovation because it was not designed as a tool for innovation. VOC tools, which were created in the 1980s, were intended to help engineers craft products and make design trade-off decisions after products had entered into development—in other words, after the product idea had already been generated. For years, traditional VOC practitioners have tried to persuade companies that the same tools are useful for coming up with the initial product concept, but that is simply not the case. In the paragraphs that follow, we’ll explain why not, and why our method works better.

It’s about the job, not the product

People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.

As people make their way through each day, they encounter tasks, or jobs, that they must get done. To help get these jobs done, people use products and services. Thus, from a customer’s perspective, products and services are acquired as a means to help them get jobs done. Theodore Levitt expressed it nicely back in 1975, when he said, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” That’s the realization that has driven our thinking for years, and other prominent academics are in solid agreement with this basic construct. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, for example, agrees that “the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy.”

But with traditional VOC, whether the goal is to devise a new product concept (innovation) or improve a product design (development), the start point is not the job but a product or service (such as a razor or a movie theater). Once the product or service has been determined, VOC then works to understand customer needs relative to that solution.¹ This makes sense for a methodology that was developed to choose from among design trade-offs, and it may, on occasion, result in the creation of a slightly better mousetrap (a sharper razor or cleaner theater), but it is highly unlikely to lead to the creation of breakthrough concepts (such as Nair or Netflix). If, on the other hand, the focus is not on the product “razor” but on the job of “hair removal,” then it’s much more likely that a concept such as Nair will be developed. Note too that while a product like the “razor” may change quickly, the job of “hair removal” remains constant over time: the customers’ need to remove hair doesn’t change over time, although the product or service that helps them accomplish that job may.

Another drawback of traditional VOC practices, stemming from its product focus, is that it tends to result in the collection of needs that relate to what we call consumption chain tasks (tasks relating to the use of the product—acquiring, receiving, setting up, using, maintaining, and disposing of a it) rather than the collection of needs that relate to the actual job the customer is trying to get done, even though the job is the reason the customer is using the product in the first place.

The framework for understanding customer needs

Our methodology requires that a company understand exactly what job the customer is trying to get done before any attempts at innovation are made. This is accomplished by conducting customer interviews or literature searches to understand the discrete process steps that comprise the job.

The breakdown of the job into these discrete steps is represented graphically by a job map. Job mapping has many benefits, all of which are discussed in “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map” (Harvard Business Review, May 2008). Its primary purpose is to provide a framework within which to capture and organize need statements and to ensure that no customer needs get overlooked or neglected. The job map’s ability to capture all the customer’s needs makes it superior to VOC techniques, which state from the outset that they cannot capture all customer needs.  If a customer has 100 or more different, detailed needs, shouldn’t you know all of them? Missing even one might mean missing a perfect opportunity for innovation.

Defining what a customer need is—with precision

One strength of our approach is that we standardize how we record customer jobs and the outcomes they use to measure success at each step in the course of getting the job done. The advantage to this is that anyone who reads the resulting statement can know exactly what the job is and what the desired outcome is. There is no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding. Here is the format in which we record the jobs customers are trying to get done:

Figure 1. The Format of a Job Statement