Seminar on "Voice of Customer" through QFD

A seminar on Voice of Customer (VOC), which the 2nd seminar on Quality Function Deployment (QFD) series, was organized by Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) and co-organized by Hong Kong Quality Function Deployment Association (HKQFDA) on 16 Dec 2011. Meeting customer needs is fundamental to achieving customer satisfaction. QFD provides a method for collecting, processing and deploying the VOC to designing product and service features so as to meet the customer needs. I gave an opening remarks and introduced the guest speaker.

Dr. Catherine Chan (President, Hong Kong QFD Association) was the speaker to introduce how QFD deals with VOC. QFD has been used for doing quality planning and product design over 40 years.

QFD refers:
Q - Quality which is determined by Customer Expectations (CE)
F - Function which is the "HOW" of the product or service for meeting the CE
D - Deployment which is how suppliers manage the flow of the development efforts so as to make certain that CE drive the development of products and services.
Then Dr. Catherine Chan brief three basic steps of QFD below:
1. Identify the important customers' needs
2. Translate customers' needs into quality elements & identify the important ones
3. Deploy the important quality elements into various aspects to achieve quality

After introduced QFD basic concept, Dr. Catherine Chan said Voice of the Customer was Primary Source of Information for Product/Service Development.
There were 2 Don'ts.
"Don't assume you know customers' needs/requirements."
"Don't Ask Customers What the Product/Service Should Be"
It was because "Not All Customers can tell their Needs/Requirments"

Dr. Catherine Chan stated several ways to collect customer needs such as Observe, Ask, Feel, Listen, Smell, etc. Then she introduced four steps to collect of VOC.
1 - Forecast possible failure that may happen
2 - Work with Representable Customers
3 - Go to the real place to see what to be needed (Gemba 現場)
4 - Propose scenes for the product to be used

She explained how to positively and completely Interpret VOC as follows:
1 - Change negative voice into positive voice
2 - Convert opinions and suggestions into needs
3 - Extract needs from the voice
4 - Add in missing needs from completion
5 - Identify both existing and potential needs

Stop when most of the needs appear to repeat and organize customers' needs into groups
A restaurant case used as an example.



Finally, Dr. Chan used "Innovation" as conclusion to find out more effective and economical way to meeting customer needs.

Q&A

After the seminar, I represented HKSQ to present a souvenir to Dr. Catherine Chan.

At the end, Dr. Albert Tsang (Ex-Chairman of HKSQ) introduced ANQ Congress 2012 which will be held in Hong Kong.

Reference:
HKSQ - http://www.hksq.org/index.asp
HKQFDA - http://www.qfdhk.org/
ANQ Congress 2012 Hong Kong - http://www.anq2012.org/