Volume 9, #2 March 2011
Five (Poor) Excuses for Abandoning VOC Research
Ditch the justifications and immunize your company against lost opportunity
Over the years I have helped scores of companies develop rigorous voice-of-the-customer programs so they can understand at a deep level what stands in the way of their customers' success and define their products accordingly.
Sometimes, when I reconnect with these companies a year or two later, I find the programs abandoned and the data we worked to gather going stale. Since my approach is more "teach them to fish" than "give them the fish," it's dismaying to find that the program we worked so hard on is languishing. But I understand some reasons why this may happen--reasons that hold lessons for any company seeking to build rigorous customer research into its front-end product development process.
Here are five common excuses companies give for not making customer research an ongoing part of product definition:
- It's time consuming.
- It's easier to use anecdotal evidence from the sales force.
- Other projects and initiatives take precedence for funding.
- Senior management doesn't see the value.
- The people who understood and championed the project have left.
The rest of this article knocks down each of these arguments and makes the case for continued investment in gathering and analyzing customer data. It's kind of like getting immunized against a disease. If you skip the immunization, you might get lucky and avoid catching the disease--making the immunization seem unnecessary. If you're effectively immunized, you might never fully understand the possibly dire impact of the disease.
The people who really understand the value of immunizations are those who have suffered the consequences of not being immunized. In the case of product development, these would be the people who have introduced products that failed to meet customer expectations. If there were a shot to protect against that, wouldn't you take it?
The Five Excuses
1. It's time consuming.
Well, yes. In-depth, in-person, on-site interviews (which we recommend as part of the data gathering process) take time. But so does defining and building a product--especially when you have to do it twice because you didn't discover just before launch (or worse, after introduction) that the product completely missed the mark or required some significant costly tweaks.
2. It's easier to use anecdotal evidence from the sales force.
The sales force is a great asset… for selling products and services. That's their job. In carrying out that job, good sales people will get to know and understand customer issues deeply and use that knowledge to craft an appealing sales story. But the sales force is not a market research organization. It does not carry out rigorous investigation into customer needs that produces quantifiable results. Basing your product definition on anecdotal evidence may sometimes lead you to create a valuable product, but it's not reliable and repeatable.
3. Other projects and initiatives take precedence for funding.
Of course they do. The ROI on ongoing customer research can be hard to define and sell to management. If a project was originally funded as a one-time or pilot project, it may be hard to keep funding going. Why should you conduct more research when you already have a perfectly good database providing insights from the initial project a year or two ago? Certainly, if properly collected and maintained, a database can yield valuable customer insights long after initial data collection. But as product life cycles--and even the life cycles of entire industries--grow shorter, the opportunities flow to those on the leading edge of the curve. And you don't get leading-edge insights without continued investment.
4. Senior management doesn't see the value.
That's because they've never had smallpox or whooping cough--or didn't suffer much when they did. If the CEO has never had to explain to the board of directors that the latest innovation is six months late and a million dollars over budget, maybe he or she hasn't experienced enough discomfort to comprehend the importance of ongoing investment in a deep understanding of the customer. Institutionalizing customer research gives the CEO a chance to stand up at next year's meeting and explain how the company's main product arrived on time and on budget and sailed past the competition in market penetration.
5. The people who understood and championed the project have left.
No matter how wonderful a methodology or approach, in the end, it's up to people to make it happen. Maybe you had a great team on the initial project. Then the team leader left or a couple of key players moved on to other positions in the company. Suddenly, the human infrastructure and momentum was gone. This challenge cries out for the solution of institutionalizing the process. When you make gathering and analyzing in-depth customer insights part of the fabric of how you do business, you won't be relying on individual initiative to make things happen.
ASSESS YOUR CUSTOMER RESEARCH PROGRAM
Many activities of life must be done more than once. Some of the daily tasks of living--cooking meals, cleaning up, doing laundry--come to mind, or the longer-term home responsibilities like servicing the furnace or caulking the windows.
But while we would never think that painting a home's exterior was a one-time job, with no need ever to re-evaluate and possibly repeat, we sometimes don't think of solving our customers' problems as requiring the same kind of cyclical attention. You might focus on a big new product development project, use the data you've gathered, and even follow up and evaluate the results of that particular project. Hard as it might seem to believe, you'll need to do it again--and again, and again, and again.
Take the mini-assessment to help evaluate whether you're overdue for some regular attention to customer problems.
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