By Issa Bass
One of the root causes of poor quality in products or services is understood within the quality circles to be the variations within the production processes. And if there is one thing that all quality experts have agreed on, it is the need to instill quality in the production processes by reducing the variations instead of inspecting the products at the end of the production lines to assure that they meet the customers’ expectations.

Since all production processes aim at satisfying some customers (Whether they are internal or external), their needs (explicit as well as implicit) need to be determined and integrated in the processes before the potential variations are addressed.

Any New Product Development or product or process improvement should start with capturing the Voice Of the Customer, in other words what the customers expect to find in the products need to be precisely assessed and integrated in the design of the products. Several techniques are used to capture the Voice Of the Customer. Surveys, Customer service data collection, interviews and focus groups are just a few tools used to identify the customer needs.

Capturing the Voice Of the Customer
The first step in capturing the Voice Of the Customer is the determination of who the customer is. Customers are generally divided in two groups; they are either internal or external. Internal customers are the Next-step- in-the-process when one is dealing with production in progress. Every business is composed of several processes and a process is defined as a sequence of events, a chain of tasks. When the production process is started, the materials and/or information flow through the chain of tasks to generate the products or services needed and every task becomes a supplier to the tasks downstream and a customer to the tasks upstream.

The second type of internal customer would be the process owners and all the stakeholders when one is working on a project. External customers are the users of the final product or service.

The importance of the customers remains the same under all circumstances, whether the customers are internal or external, because customers, whether they are internal or external can make or break a company. Yet the methods used to capture their needs are different.

    Capturing The Voice Of The Internal Customer
Failure to clearly and precisely understand the needs of the internal customers and translate them into critical-to-quality characteristics of the products or services can seriously increase the cost of production through project overruns, product or service redesign or internal rework, products return and customer services. 

• Capturing the Voice of the customers of a project

A project is in general the work of a team that is usually cross-functional. Yet the teams that work on the design, the development or the implementation of a project are seldom its customers, its end users. For instance, when a project for new Warehouse Management System (WMS) is initiated, the people who will be managing the project implementation are hardly ever the ones who will be actually using the system in their daily activities. A group of project managers is gathered to set up the system and once it is ready, the Operations department of the business is more likely to use it. So in this particular case, the primary customer for the project would be Operations.      

One of the critical elements of a project is its clear definition. Since the main canon of communication between the Steering Committee (which oversees the project development and implementation) and the project team is the project charter, capturing the voice of the project customers becomes easier because it is clearly laid out on signed document which should state the Roles and Responsibilities of each and every participant.

• Capturing the Voice of the Next-Step-In-The-Process.

As mentioned earlier, in the chain of events that constitutes the business process, the Next-Step-In-The-Process is the customer of the Current Step when the production is in progress. To reduce the probability for internal rework and improve the quality level, the efficiency and productivity, the employee at the Current step is expected to deliver a defect free product to the next step. For that to happen, the employees will need to clearly understand what every step of the process expects from the previous ones. Several tools are use for that purpose.

·         AS-Is process mapping

Process mapping is a graphical representation of a process flow. It is an effective tool to visualize a process in a very simple way. Flow charts are generally used to describe how material and information flow from step to step throughout the process. When unambiguous comments are added to every control of the flow chart, the chart becomes a good tool for understanding the requirements at every level of the process and also for pinpointing potential sources of non conformance.

·         Employees feedback

Employees who are directly working “hands on” on the products or transferring information are an invaluable sources for understanding the materials they work on and the conditions in which they move from task to task.

·         QA feedbacks

In an enterprise that values organizational excellence, the role of the Quality Control department cannot be circumscribed to auditing products to prevent defective parts from reaching customers or monitoring process performance through control charts. The QA departments should be associated to every step of the processes, from concept design, to development and implementation. Once the production is in progress, QA is supposed to be among the most knowledgeable about the quality of the products and the potential sources of their shortcomings. QA associates should be the resource that provides the feedback about where improvement efforts should concentrate within the chain of tasks.

Capturing the Voice Of the External Customer.
The external customers are the consumers of the final product or service. Their expectations about a product are not necessarily homogeneous but it is always possible to find underling common trends among them and manage the quintessential needs in ways that are conducive to the production of goods or services that meet their expectations at a reasonable cost for the producer. Customers’ expectations are collected in several ways.

• Survey

A survey is a gathering of opinion about a product or service through a sample of randomly selected customers. It is generally based on a questionnaire with the idea of generating a well constructed customer perception of the quality of products or services and identifying their weaknesses and their strength. The pertinence of the survey is contingent upon how its statistical analysis was conducted, mainly on the sample size, the margin of error and the confidence level. Surveys can be conducted in several ways.
One way of conducting a survey is asking customers, to rate some of the critical elements of a product in order to generate actionable data that can be geared towards improvement.
The Likert scale is a good example of how a survey can be conducted to generate an objective result.

• Likert Scale

A Likert scale is a metric used to measure customers’ attitude or preferences about a product or service. A question related to an aspect a product is asked but the responses to the question are not open and they are restricted. The responses are ordinal in the sense that the can be ranked from lowest to highest in value.

An example of a Likert Scale ranking would be: “Not Relevant at all (0)”, “Somewhat Relevant (1)”, “Relevant (2)”, “Very Relevant (3)”, “Extremely Relevant (4)”. The numbers in parenthesis are not additive; they are just codes that are not always necessary. 

After the survey is completed, the responses to each question are summed up (how many “Very Relevant” did we have for question 1….?); and this is used to generate scores for every question.

• Customer service data collection

Customer Services (CSR) are in general the main point of contact between the customers and the business when poor quality products are sold. The CSR department becomes therefore an invaluable resource for quality assessment since when customer complaints are recorded, the files include the nature of the problems they are encountering and in some cases what caused the problems.
But because customers very seldom call to complement businesses when they are satisfied with the products they buy, the data generated at Customer Services need to be taken with caution.

• Focus groups
• A focus group is a discussion group composed of a few chosen people (about five to nine) to talk about a selected subject. When used for marketing purposes or product development, the intention is generally to assess the customers’ expectations about the product.  It is particularly appropriate for obtaining numerous perspectives about the same matter.

 Capturing the Voice Of the Customer is one thing, organizing the customers’ expectations and integrating it in the products is another. The Part II of this article will delve in the ways the data collected from customers can be organized to improve on quality. Part II will be about Kano Analysis and how to build a Quality Function Deployment matrix.

About the author
Issa Bass is the managing editor of SixSigmaFirst. He can be reached at issa@sixsigmafirst.com

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