A New Perspective on VOC
Lance Bettencourt,
Tony Ulwick
Aug 27, 2009
By Strategyn's Lance Bettencourt, PhD and Tony Ulwick
Strategyn and its competitors share a common goal – to help corporations around the world create breakthrough products and services for their customers. Since 1991, Strategyn has been dedicated not only to advancing traditional voice-of-the-customer (VOC) practices for identifying needs, but more broadly to understanding and advancing every aspect of the innovation process.
Strategyn’s Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) process was created by Tony Ulwick and has been significantly enhanced over the years by clients and many Strategyn team members, including Dr. Lance Bettencourt, a PhD in marketing and a former marketing professor. With nearly 20 years of experience implementing its programs in companies around the world, Strategyn has been able to evolve quickly, testing and refining its ideas and methodology. As a result, Strategyn considers itself well qualified to challenge the voice-of-the-customer practices that for years have produced less than stellar results.
When it comes to identifying customer needs, Strategyn agrees with VOC practitioners on the following points:
- innovation and new product development should be guided by an understanding of customer needs
- to be successful at understanding customer needs, you need a structured process;
- customer needs and solutions are distinct
- it is the company's job to come up with solutions, not the customer's job
But when it comes to capturing needs for innovation, we are in strong disagreement regarding:
- the framework for capturing customer needs
- the definition of a customer need
- the notion that VOC offers the level of specificity required to enable clear and actionable innovation
These differences are largely due to the fact that Strategyn's research practices are optimized for innovation: they are designed to capture and prioritize the customer inputs that planners and strategists need in order to discover market opportunities and devise winning product concepts that can then enter the development process.
Strategyn’s methodology is counterintuitive to many longtime voice-of-the-customer practitioners because traditional 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. Traditional VOC practitioners have for years tried to persuade companies that the same tools are useful for innovation, but that is simply not the case, as product failure rates of 70 to 90 percent attest. Yet despite VOC's ineffectiveness when it comes to innovation, its supporters continue to push and defend its applicability. It's time for a new perspective on VOC.
