Quality Management

It's clear that learning more about your customer is good. Direct communication with customers enables you to work with them to achieve the best result. This is easy to do for small businesses. On a larger scale it can be more difficult. Questionnaires, focus groups and the like aim to achieve the same goal as direct communication. These methods are effective but there is a risk that the VOC will get lost or misheard.

For example, a questionnaire may ask customers how a firm can improve their customer service. Typically it will ask them to rate their experience and then offer suggestions. This might give the firm an accurate percentage of customers who were dissatisfied with their experience but it might not accurately tell them why.

Using Keller as an example, the student surveys are a way for the school to gauge student's perceptions of their classes. That's if students give accurate feedback. Often students just tick 'satisfactory' throughout the whole questionnaire and then leave no comments. Then there are the classes where students sing their Professors praises because the class was easy.

Keller isn't getting accurate feedback but often organizations listen to what they want to hear. When we talk about VOC and in the same breath say that some customers don't matter that sends a clear message that the sentiments of this practice can be hollow.

Being aware of actual and potential capabilities in employee performance could dramatically effect employee retention and hiring practices. If you have the right measures in place, you can rely on the data as a predictor of employee performance. If there was need for a change you could weigh up the costs of firing an employee versus trying a new approach such as retraining.

Data can also show you if changes you've made are suiting employees or not. You might notice a drop in performance as a result of implementing a system that doesn't play to your employees strengths.