Capturing and Leveraging the “Voice of the Customer”

This chapter begins by revisiting the organization described in the case study introduced in Chapter  1 , focusing on how insights drawn from interviews with customers enabled that organization to align its internal perspective of quality with the customer perspective. We transition to a discussion of how and why customer centricity is a central theme in our current commercial milieu, and how it has paved the way for widespread development and implementation of corporate “voice of the customer” (VoC) programs. The pivotal idea behind these programs is obtaining information via listening to customers that can be used to focus and direct efforts to improve customer experiences and relationships. The concepts of relationship marketing and value-chain analysis are applied to provide increased clarity regarding why firms are investing in VoC programs, and we conclude with a discussion of how our proposed model of organizational listening and response can be used in the design, implementation, and evaluation of such programs.