How to Organize a VOC Road Trip
By Chris Parks
We got our cross-functional team together, reviewed the basic precepts of VOC, and reaffirmed what we were trying to accomplish through the process. We discussed meeting roles of the moderator, the note-taker, and the observer(s) and drove home the point that everyone would be asked to participate in formalizing the notes as soon as possible after each meeting – we decided to rotate the roles for each customer so that the note-taker workload was reasonable for all.
Results
Most importantly, company management and marketing were very pleased to find that the more disciplined and rigorous we were in gathering customer needs input, the more trusting the engineering community was in accepting the results of the market research. Because of participation and buy-in from our technical team we were able to quickly prioritize new product feature development, and to resolve long standing debates about next generation system architecture.
One of the best unanticipated results of our customer interview meetings was the immediate increase in DSP system business we saw from the opinion leader installer dealers. Like watering a plant, the mere fact that a senior cross-functional team had traveled to the field with the sole purpose of listening and understanding problems, had an immediate positive effect on the mindshare we received in these accounts.
