There are a number of other VoC methods that are used, but that are not as effective or as widespread as the preceding examples, although that may be changing in the field of customer or user designs. A brief summary of each follows:
- Customer advisory board: This VoC approach has been around for many years and is comprised of your best and most vocal proponents, and sometimes detractors, of your product to advise the firm of what problems they are having and what new products might be needed. This can be mutually beneficial if they are done correctly, allowing the firm to send a key signal to these targeted customers that we value their input, and further allowing the firm to also uncover some new opportunities to satisfy this often demanding set of customers. While this has a long history, it is not found to be especially effective. This may be due to the nature of customer advisory boards, or more likely, due to the way the customer advisory board meetings are structured. Most of the time, these meetings are very loosely structured, with no real agenda or defined outcome. If you are going to deploy a customer advisory board, make sure you have a structured session with clear discussion points and exercises to gain the most benefit from everyone's time.
- Community of enthusiasts: This is not dissimilar to the customer advisory board. The organization forms a community of enthusiasts who discuss the product problems and ideas for new features/concepts. Typically, this is done on the internet and is relatively easy to set up with the various wiki and chatting software that is available at little or no cost. The advantages are much like the customer advisory board, as many of the best ideas for products will come from those who know the product the best and push the product boundaries. It is very easy to monitor the activity in the chat room to gain insights into what is actually going on in the community and to attempt to develop new product solutions or concepts. The downside of this approach is that it takes considerable time to make sure you are actively participating in the group discussions, or the community will likely die. The second challenge is the skill it takes to ferret out the information necessary for good product decisions from the other noise that often occurs in these types of forums. Certainly, this method is not useful for all product categories, and is best suited for product categories where there is already an enthusiastic community. Samples would include sports equipment, automobiles, some software, and mobile phones.
- The customer or user designs: This is a relatively new VoC process and has largely been made possible through the advent of information technology and the internet. As part of Open Innovation, the concept of customer designs often falls under the area of crowdsourcing. While the Cooper and Dreher research considered Open Innovation a separate methodology, I believe this is an area where the lines are much more blurred and I consider this both an Open Innovation concept as well as a VoC methodology. In the concept of crowdsourcing, customers or users are invited to help the product designer design the next product. The benefits can be substantial, as you are potentially tapping into the needs and wants of thousands of customers.
Crowdsourcing got its start in the early 2000s. Companies such as Starbucks and Dell released their My Starbuck Idea and Dell IdeaStorm. If one looks at My Starbucks Idea, you will see comments about bringing back a certain coffee or cake, but you will also see ideas on how to make Starbucks a better retailer (emailing a reminder before rewards expire, notifying baristas on-screen of card reward, freezing gold card status for military while deployed) as well as new product offerings and ways to conduct business (short-sized fraps for kids, bicycle-friendly service, and dairy alternatives).
You may believe that crowdsourcing is a very niche play and that more complex businesses could not benefit from it. Fiat, the number one car manufacturer in Italy, would vehemently disagree. In 2009, they sought a design for a new concept vehicle. Rather than turning inward to their team of designers and engineers, the company took an unusual tack and turned outward, to their customers. With the aid of a viral marketing campaign, Fiat crowd-sourced the design of their new concept car, the Mio, and let the world decide how the car would look, feel, and drive. The company set up a crowdsourcing platform on its website that elicited over 10,000 different suggestions from 160 different counties for the new vehicle. The Fiat Mio became the world's first crowd-sourced car, with Fiat implementing many of the suggestions they received during the campaign. The Fiat Mio was unveiled at the San Paulo International Automobile show to rave reviews and has garnered numerous design awards:
Figure 4.4: Crowdsourcing automobiles
Crowdsourcing is becoming more and more common as companies are looking for new ideas, and new ways to cut costs. Crowdsourcing continues to grow. Nokia has launched the Invent with Nokia scheme, where Nokia will pay would-be inventors for their ideas if they like them enough to prototype them.
Whole new business models have evolved as a result of crowdsourcing through sites such as Quirky (www.quirky.com), and at least one new crowd-sourced car company, Local Motors, is selling crowd-sourced cars to the public, as well as a very unique buying experience where you become part of the assembly team, at a considerable premium over an off-the-line automobile:
Additional VoC analytical tools, such as conjoint analysis and QFD, also use the same methods that we have described here to collect customer data. Tools like these will be very helpful in parsing the customer data we collect, and will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, Understanding the Customer's Voice, where we will review how to take VoC and create successful products.