The “voice of the customer” (VOC) are needs and expectations expressed in the customer’s language. How can you make these words meaningful to your employees as they make and deliver orders such as this one? You will have to translate them from the customer’s language. You have to put it in terms that are meaningful to your employees’ work.
The “voice of the customer” is a process used to capture the requirements/feedback from the customer (internal or external) to provide the customers with the best in class service/product quality. This process is all about being proactive and constantly innovative to capture the changing requirements of the customers with time.
The “voice of the customer” is the term used to describe the stated and unstated needs or requirements of the customer. The voice of the customer can be captured in a variety of ways: Direct discussion or interviews, surveys, focus groups, customer specifications, observation, warranty data, field reports, complaint logs, etc.
This data is used to identify the quality attributes needed for a supplied component or material to incorporate in the process or product.
Customer feedback is important to ensure that customer needs are met. Besides surveys, focus groups and/or workouts would be excellent to solicit feedback and meaningful inputs, including VOC and confirming CTQs with customers and even suppliers.
Put another way, you have to translate the voice of the customer into critical-to-quality requirements or CTQs.
What are CTQs? CTQs are the performance characteristics of a process, product, or service that are critically important to customers. CTQs are measurable. They measure how good performance needs to be to satisfy the needs and expectations of customers.
The internal critical quality parameters that relate to the wants and needs of the customer. They are not the same as CTCs (critical to customer), and the two are often confused.
CTCs are what is important to the customer; CTQs are what’s important to the quality of the process or service to ensure the things that are important to the customer.
A quality function deployment (QFD) or CTQ tree relates the CTQs to the CTCs.
To recap CTQs are the measurable performance characteristics of a process, product, or service that are critically important to customers. With CTQs you know what metrics to monitor and how well they must perform to satisfy customers. CTQs provide customer focus for your process on a day-in day-out basis, and if you embark on any improvement or design projects, don’t lose focus on the customer. Ensure that you measure CTQs pre- and post-project.