A necessary first step in any customer visit process is to understand why you are conducting the market research in the first place. As alluded to in the preceding quote from Alice in Wonderland, unless you have clearly defined objectives for the VoC initiative you are undertaking, how will you use the information you learn, how will you know when you have gotten there?
To define the task at hand, the best thing you can do is to write it down! While it is often beneficial to visit customers, even when there is no clear goal, you will not end up where you need to be. And though it is often difficult to fully articulate what it is you hope to accomplish, by writing it down you reap a number of benefits.
First, it forces you to decide between various paths and make a commitment, both to yourself and the organization. All too often, product and marketing managers are pulled in multiple directions with multiple priorities, all of which need to be done. When analyzing a potential new offering for the business, there will be a host of avenues to explore and areas of ignorance you wish to learn more about. Writing your objectives down will likely help to reduce the scale of the actual task as it will allow you to become more focused on devising a plan to meet the ultimate goal and not get pulled in too many adjacent areas with less intrinsic value to the organization or the task at hand.
While difficult for many, the goal is to develop a statement of intent for the VoC interviews from which to develop a plan. This statement of intent needs to be concise enough so that it is clear in your own mind exactly what will be executed and accomplished. If it is too vague or ambiguous, it will be very difficult for you to explain to others in the organization and it will leave you with questionable results.
The following are some guidelines you may wish to adhere to when developing your own statement of intent for your customer visits:
- Your statement of intent should be no more than two sentences, 25 words max (ideally somewhere between 10–20): If you end up with a longer statement of intent than this, chances are you are either biting off more than you can chew or you don't have a clear, concise idea of what it is that you are trying to accomplish.
- The statement of intent should be achievable: While it is noble to try and solve all the problems of your company with your VoC initiative, the statement of intent must be doable while still being framed so as to provide a benefit to the organization that will need to fund and resource your program.
- The statement of intent must be framed as being consistent with the goals of the organization: Only by articulating and showing value will you get the organizational buy-in you require.
- The statement of intent should provide a clear direction for the VoC process: While your actual plan for the VoC interview process may differ from everyone else's expectations, your statement of intent should be such that it will not be a significant difference.
- Look to key action verbs when defining your statement of intent: Consider verbs such as identify, describe, define, create, understand, generate, explore, investigate, and ascertain when formulating your statement of intent. It is also beneficial to identify whether you will be studying/interviewing all your customers or a particular sub-segment. A good rule of thumb is to create a statement of intent with the following formula:
To [action verb]…[market segment]…resulting in [objective]
The following are some B2B examples to help illustrate the preceding points:
- To understand small manufacturers' buying considerations for conveyor systems resulting in our next generation conveyor rollers
- To identify new market opportunities in the ethanol chemical processing market resulting in new distilling equipment
- To investigate how customers in the food processing industry measure raw material purity resulting in enhancements to our vision system
- To describe key processes in the automobile painting application industry resulting in identification of key product features for industrial painting robots
- To define key interface requirements for embedded software stacks for the telematics market resulting in a prioritized list of required product attributes
When creating your statement of intent, do be careful not to use verbs that would be more clearly associated with other mass-market research techniques such as surveys. Some of the words you should avoid when constructing your statement of intent would include evaluate, test, measure, project, and forecast.
While a statement of intent will help you, the program manager, greatly, it will also have additional benefits to your organization regarding two key constituents:
- Your management
- Your associates in other departments whose support you will need to conduct an effective VoC program
Your management is likely paying for this program and has a vested interest in the results and success you generate. If your statement of intent is ambiguous or lacks clarity, it is likely your management will walk away with a different set of expectations than what you will be able to deliver. If your statement is clear, but management does not concur with the direction you have outlined in your statement of intent, there is still the opportunity for the following:
- Educate management why the direction you have set out is the correct one
- Refine the statement to more closely align with the direction management is setting for the organization
- Get additional resources (if required) to meet the new direction if management changes the scope of the program
It is far, far better to be aligned with management before you start a VoC program than trying to justify the program and results after the fact.
Almost as important as getting buy-in from management is the need to get buy-in from associates in other parts of the organization who will be affected by, may need to help resource, or will ultimately use the results you generate. As anyone who has worked in a corporate environment will tell you, if you don't get buy-in from your associates at the beginning of an initiative, there is very little chance you will get buy-in at the end.
If the other departments in the organization are able to offer their input, advice, and criticism, then not only will you end up with a better program, you will also likely end up with wide support across the organization.
Once you have completed your statement of intent, you should also put some structure around the next level of detail outlining the objectives of the visit. Specifically, the objectives will clearly enumerate the number of visits you intend to pursue, a timeline with the critical dates, an articulation of the types of customers you will visit, and a defined resultant report to be sent out to the organization.
By way of some illustrative examples:
Complete a total of 16 customer interviews in eight companies with software engineers in the embedded software telematics market. Output will be delivered to the organization via presentation to upper management and findings will be incorporated into software release 3.4.
By the end of December, we will have interviewed a total of 20 people in the automobile assembly market with 50% in engineering and 50% in production design. The resultant findings will be incorporated into our Excelsior Project MRD and presented to the directors by January 31.