Every company wants to get closer to their customers and understand their unarticulated wants, needs, and desires. Unfortunately, there is not a silver bullet that will give you all the answers you need to make the next great breakthrough product, but rather you likely need to deploy multiple methods to get the result you desire. In this chapter, we discussed the various types of ways you can choose to conduct VoC research, from interviews, to ethnographical research, to crowdsourcing. Ultimately, you must decide which method, or combination of methods, will work best for your organization. Many of us are well aware of survey research and how that has changed over time with the introduction of the internet and email. While it has been around for a long time, it is still a very economical way to get feedback from 30 to 30,000 customers. Some organizations have used focus groups for their customer research and some have found great success, but perhaps too many have had mixed results. Ethnographical research and lead user research both have the ability to drive true innovation, but both require a considerable time and financial commitment.

In the research conducted by Cooper and Dreher, customer interviews were the most popular VoC method used and are very close to being the most effective of all the VoC methods analyzed. In the next chapter, we will begin to put together the framework on how to construct a customer interview, and in Chapter 6, The Interview Process—The Interview, we will talk about the execution of the customer visit and interview.