VOC/Customer Focus

Achieving Customer Delight Via VOC and Data Analysis

A service center may performing at consistent service levels, but the customer retention and satisfaction index may be low. Direct measurement of customer perceptions using questionnaires or focus groups is more telling than service level metrics.

Asking the Right Questions Is the Key to Data Collection

In the Measure phase of the Six Sigma DMAIC improvement methodology, data is collected and analyzed to provide a performance baseline for the process under study. Asking questions is one of the primary ways of collecting data. How can you ensure that they are going to collect useful information?

Choosing the Best Method for Listening to the Customer

Once you decide what you want to know, from whom you want to know it, and what you will do with the data, you must carefully consider what method is best suited for gathering customer information for your Six Sigma project. This article summarizes eight types of data collection methods.

Creating Customer Delight – A Case Study in Diagnostic Clinics: Part 1 of 3

A chain of medical diagnostic clinics was developed from the ground up. After two years of hectic expansion marked by acquisitions and setting up green field clinics across a number of cities, the chain wanted to improve the turnaround time of patients and customer service.

Creating Customer Delight – A Case Study in Diagnostic Clinics: Part 2 of 3

Almost all organizations identify customer satisfaction as an area for improvement and as key to business success. In this installment of a three-part case study in creating customer delight, a medical diagnostic center tackles patient problems identified through observation and feedback.

Creating Customer Delight – A Case Study in Diagnostic Clinics: Part 3 of 3

In the final installment of this three-part case study, a medical diagnostic clinic reduces the turnaround time of lab reports, improving cycle time for 90 percent of blood tests and increasing customer satisfaction.

Defining CTQ Outputs: A Key Step in the Design Process

After starting a project and gathering VOC data, it is time to define the critical-to-quality outputs. To prioritze their actions during this process, practitioners may use a quality function deployment (QFD), also known as the house of quality.

Delight Customers: Reduce Defects in Service Delivery

Recently, a VOC survey revealed that operator response at a company was poor and customer satisfaction was low. The resulting improvement efforts serve as an example of how a service process can be turned around using the principles of Six Sigma.

Enhanced VOC Data Collection Can Jump Start Projects

The Lean Six Sigma project leader has to determine how products or services affects customer behavior…not just what the customer says. An enhanced VOC data collection process can improve project execution and make the project leader's job easier.

Getting the Bugs Out: VOC Analysis and Scenario Planning

Organizations can keep their customers delighted by brainstorming about ways to help them meet their goals and testing solutions on internal employees.

Increasing Customer Interactions

Even the Internet economy requires customer interaction for quality purposes. Learn how to build productive customer relationships that help you offer higher quality products and services.

Is CRM the Six Sigma of the New Economy?

The Internet eliminates entry barriers to global markets and little differentiates your business from your competition. Will Baldridge, TQM and Six Sigma support your Internet business processes or will new e-conomy tools, such as CRM, become as necessary as FMEA and SPC?

Is Software Inspection Value Added?

In manufacturing circles it is generally accepted that inspections are money wasted. But in the world of software that is definitely not the case. This brief case study uses scorecards to illustrate the value and payoff that can be realized by introducing software inspections.

Knowing Who Your Customers Are

Before an organization can gather accurate voice-of-the-customer-data, it must answer some basic questions about the nature of its various customer gruops.

Language Data: The ‘Other Data’ of Six Sigma, Part 1 of 2: Nature of Language Data

There is a kind of data that gets less press than the numbers so visible in almost all Six Sigma work – language data. The fact that it receives less exposure does not mean it is less worthy of exploration.

Language Data: The ‘Other Data’ of Six Sigma, Part 2 of 2: Using Language Data

A number of useful ways exist for processing and using language data, among them pre-processing raw language data for specific uses, focusing on an efficient data sample and distilling the data for particular purposes.

Net Promoter Score: A Number for Business to Grow By

Net promoter scores (NPSs) are an economical and concise way to assess how loyal a company’s customers are. Managing that metric is the key to future growth. Companies using NPS must narrow their focus and consider the influence of value.

Nine Steps to Create a Great Customer Survey: Part 1

Many organizations use surveys to gather information to learn more about their customers. To prepare a successful survey, practitioners should follow nine basic steps that focus on its design and audience; the first three steps are explored here.

Nine Steps to Create a Great Customer Survey: Part 2

Practitioners should follow nine basic steps when preparing a survey. Part One of this series discussed establishing a goal and a sample, and choosing the method. The next three steps relate to what types of questions to ask and how to ask them.

Nine Steps to Create a Great Customer Survey: Part 3

To generate a valuable customer survey, practitioners should follow nine steps. The last article in this three-part series covers the final three steps: pre-testing the survey, administering the survey and analyzing the survey's results.

Quick, Quality Decision-Making Using Six Sigma Tools

A significant part of business success can come from the speed and quality of decision-making, which leads to performance improvements that reduce rework and drive benefits to the bottom line faster. Six Sigma has tools that improve decision-making.

Six Sigma for Sales: Truth About the Customers’ Needs

A successful sales strategy is to determine what things have the greatest leverage, and focus scarce resources on them. One way to accomplish this is to close the gap between what customers value and what you provide using the Six Sigma methodology.

Strategies for Surveying Employees

Most companies can benefit from surveying their employees for the primary purpose of gauging morale. Improvements in morale generally indicate a more satisfied work force, which often translates into a more effective and efficient team that plays a critical role in the company's quality and bottom lines.

Strengthening the Employee-customer Interaction

The most perfectly designed process is only as good as the human being who uses it. That’s the idea behind Human Sigma, a new branch of Six Sigma that focuses on improving employee-customer encounters particularly within service organizations.

The Customer, Trust, Quality and the Bottom Line

The link between a Six Sigma project and the ultimate customer is sometimes difficult because of the vagueness at the strategic level. It was interesting and relevant to see the results earlier this year from the annual Edelman Trust Barometer.

Three Simple Questions: How to Focus Your VOC Research

A lot of time can be saved in the planning stages of a survey or research project by simply answering three short questions. This article includes two real-world examples of how these three questions are essential to defining a voice of the customer (VOC) survey or research project.

Tips and Technology for Six Sigma in Mobile Workforces

Deploying Six Sigma in areas of high workforce mobility or dispersion, such as field sales and service, has proven challenging. This is ironic in that mobile workforces are closest to customers, and a Six Sigma strength is its focus on customers.

Turning Customer Data into Critical-to-Satisfaction Data

In Six Sigma, a successful business knows its customers by identifying the voice of the customer (VOC). And, the key to success in that process is gathering customer data and converting it into measurable critical-to-satisfaction elements.

Understand and Quantify the Customer’s View

The customers' view of the value your company provides is based on the quality of the combined package of product and service. So how do you - as a quality professional - provide management with a tool to benchmark the operational performance and monitor the customer satisfaction of your organization's ability to satisfy? The customer view score may be what you need.

Use of Conjoint Analysis for the Design of New Website

To design a website focused on the science of usability instead of the art of aesthetics, a marketing team used DOE and conjoint analysis in its design process.

Use Pair-wise Questioning to Collect More Useful VOC Data

The Kano model, along with “pair-wise” questioning – a method for testing the desirability of certain product or service parameters – can aid in accurately collecting and applying VOC data.

User Stories and Measures for Competitive Analysis

User stories and measures provide a succinct way to uncover, articulate and track functionality and performance and they can be used for benchmarking and also linked to key aspects of quality function deployment (QFD) analysis.

User Stories in Lean Six Sigma Software Development

The simple construct of a user story, with the right connection to measures, tests, prioritization and performance targets, can find its way to support many kinds of development and other value-focused work.

Variance Markers in Survey Design

The idea of bio-marking, a technique used to follow individual molecules around in the laboratory, can also be applied to survey design. By creating one item, which captures the overall meaning or 'bottom line' of a survey, we can examine its variance statistically as it interacts with other items and set the stage for leverage and resource allocation via multiple regression.

VOC/Customer Focus

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