Bringing Customers Into Your Project
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by Cameron McGaughy,
Aaron Smith, Deryn Zakielarz, Jill Diffendal
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Once you are done reading about The Rolling Stones—and I know that with those guys on the cover, that’s the February PM Network story you’ll read first—kindly turn to page 38. Here you can learn about the all-important customer experience. It’s essential in this rapid-paced-feedback world of social media that your project incorporates customer needs and desires from start to finish. If you don’t, you will hear about it quickly enough and loyalty toward your product and organization might take a crippling hit.
The article provides hints on how to interview and/or observe customers to gain insights into customer “pain points.” Experts say feedback data is also highly valuable for project teams to assess customer needs. A sidebar touches on how project teams can change their mindset to be more customer-centric.
For those looking at bottom-line value of bringing customer into the process, the article cites a McKinsey study: Bring customer experience into product development, the study said, and see revenue go up by 5 to 20 percent and costs go down by as much as 25 percent, all within two to three years.
How do you bring your customers into the process? How do you identify them and figure out their needs? Please share your stories in the comments below.
Posted
by
Dan Goldfischer
on: February 01, 2017 09:46 AM |
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Comments (2)
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Aejaz Shaikh
PM I| Alyx Technologies India Pvt Ltd
Pune, Maharshatra, India
As far as possible customers should be a part of the project journey in terms of what is the project, how long will it take to complete, how helpful it will be and most important customer feedback needs to be respected, if changes are feasible and must do then most welcome, as the same time customer should not be cause for worry to the project - no scope creep.
Jess De Ocampo
Lean Six Sigma Professional/Project Manager/Consultant/| .
Manila, Ncr, Philippines
This is the Voice of the Customer (VoC) wherein, it describes your customer's feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products, processes or services.
Customer feedback is very important because it provides companies, leaders, PMs, with "actionable" insight and tangible measurable data that can be used to make better business decisions to improve their business, products, service and/or overall customer experience, increase revenue, identify satisfied and "dissatisfied" customers, customer retention, attract "new" customers, need for innovation.
After starting the project, we gather the VOC then proceed to define the CTQs (Critical To Quality) outputs. Checking for data quality and integrity is also part of the process.
For VOC to become CTQs, we follow a flowchart that provides an overview of the requirements necessary to translate the VOC into usable CTQs:
-Characteristics of product or service
-Measures and operational definitions
-Target values
-Specification limits
-Defect rate
In defining the CTQs, we use the QFD (Quality Deployment Function) which is called the "house of quality." The QFD identifies and quantifies customers’ requirements and translate them into key critical parameters. QFD helps companies, leaders, PMs to prioritize actions to improve their product, process or service to meet customers’ expectations.
Basic steps in the creation of the QFD include that we follow:
1. Identify customer needs and wants (collect VOC).
2. Identify the engineering characteristics of products or services that meet VOC
3. Set development targets and test methods for the products or services.
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