Voice of the Customer (VOC)

Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a process to discover the needs of the customer for the product or service. With this information a set of metrics can be created to quantify these requirements. A difficulty is the customer may not be able to state their requirements and may not realize what they would really like to see.

To discover requirements a number of data sources can be used such as customer interviews, complaint reports, focus groups, competitors products and even examination of products from other industries.

Not all requirements are equal. For example, if an elevator you wish to take fails to arrive, you will be annoyed at having to take the stairs. But, you will be more upset if you get into it and it fails to take you to your desired floor and you must wait to be rescued.

One approach to evaluating requirements is the Kano model. It divides requirements into three levels. The first level of requirements are the must haves. Without these requirements being met the customer will not be satisfied with the product or service. The second level are satisfiers. These are things that are nice to have. The presence and quality of these attributes is what customers usually use to judge one provider from another. The third level are the delighters. These are the things that go beyond what the customer expects. They can be small but have a large impact on customer satisfaction.

What does all this have to do with Corporate Real Estate? After all, we know our employees need office space, according to their needs or status, plus space for everything else. All managers are confident they know what their customers want. If they weren't, they wouldn't know what to provide. Employing a systematic discovery of user needs often leads to suprises and insights not understood by the process owner. By listening to the VOC we usually discover our understanding of actual customer requirements and their priorities of those requirements is incomplete.

Corporate Real Estate customer needs change constantly. New employees arrive and must be accommodated, some people leave and the functions people perform mutate over time to adjust to changing business and organizational conditions. By establishing a VOC monitoring process, these changing requirements can be quantified and the financial impact of meeting them, or not meeting them, measured.

A VOC deployment can help uncover requirements that have not been properly addressed or even ones fulfilled by separate processes in other parts of the organization. For example, with the realization of the importance of security, survivablility and redundancy since the tragedy of 9/11/01, many firms created contingency planning without completely integrating it within the real estate process. Sarbanes Oxley impacts real estate needs in many ways..