While customers have a key place in formulating our innovation strategy, many voice-of-the-customer gathering processes are flawed or misdirected.
Within the last few years, companies have placed greater emphasis in collecting voice of the customer (VOC) to accelerate their improvement and innovation efforts.
Yet companies still create processes laden with waste and bring products and services to the marketplace that fail.
Why is that?
While customers have a key place in formulating our innovation strategy, many VOC gathering processes are flawed or misdirected.
Most companies and customers are good at articulating what they are familiar with, which leads them to focus on the functions of the existing products and solutions. In turn, that's where improvement and innovation efforts are focused too.
When products, processes or services have reached a certain maturity, though, such improvements tend to be increasingly incremental. They also tend to lead to standardized waste.
If you're able to improve the quality of a product or productivity of a service by 50% later, you have to ask: Why was all of that waste built into the process in the first place?
Instead, to really innovate with products and services, companies should look at the unarticulated needs of their customers.
