I will be moderating a PDMA webcast on Thursday 27 June 2013. The presenter will be Gerry Katz of Applied Marketing Science. The topic is “Hijacked Again! Three Trends in the Field of Voice of the Customer – Some Welcome, Some Not”

Gerry Katz of Applied Marketing Science on the Voice of the Customer

When I asked Gerry “Why should someone attend this webcast?” he said:

“Because I am going to clarify all the crazy misperceptions and misinformation about what is going on in the field of VOC.”

Gerry will be describing the roles of Naysayers, Stretchers, Technovangelists. He will provide his insights on the potential for incorporating Social Media in Voice of the Customer efforts.

Here is our pre-event interview:

Mark Hart interviews Gerry Katz on Hijacked Again [Duration 2 minutes. 1 MByte]

Update: The webcast recording is available. Free with registration.

A Common Impact on Development Experience

Some implementations of Voice of the Customer research involve specialists conducting surveys and interviews. Often, reports summarizing the customer’s responses are made available to a portion of the development team and the results are summarized to shape project objectives.

With this type of implementation, some individual contributors may have the following reactions:

• Relief. Since there have been interactions with a small group of customers, you as can concentrate on your primary role (such as coding, engineering, writing,…)
• Perceived increases in confidence because current decisions are supported by customer research
• Belief that a portion of the design has been validated for a future product release.
• Confidence that additional project requirements have been finalized

The preceding reactions tend to occur in development contexts that favor compartmentalized workflows and functional silos of expertise.

An Alternative Approach

Another approach strives to enhance capabilities of individuals for implicit coordination, interaction, the design of well-crafted experiments throughout development.

In this approach, multiple techniques, including Voice of the Customer techniques, are employed to learn about:

• An evolving set of customer wants and needs
• An evolving vocabulary about an appropriate user experience and the product
• An evolving set of customer priorities

Simultaneously, individuals contributors in the development network strive to improve their autonomy, mastery, and purpose to improve their development experience.

What I Hope to Learn during the Webcast

During the webcast, I will be attentive to learn about betters ways to integrate Voice of the Customer techniques into development networks. As a bonus, those enhanced capabilities will enable more individual contributors to develop better products for customers.