The task of selecting customers to visit as part of your VoC initiative is one of the most critical and difficult parts of the entire process. No matter how excellent your execution in all other aspects of the VoC program, if you select the wrong customers for your interviews, your time and money will have been wasted, but worse, you will end up with a distorted view of the market and will likely take a path that will not yield the success you expect.

The first step in the selection process is to review the segmentation we discussed in Chapter 3, Laying the Groundwork. In that chapter, we saw that the goal of any segmentation exercise was to define your target market. If you have already heeded the advice given within that chapter, you may have already classified your customer according to a multitude of criteria such as geography, demographic, psychographic and behavioral attributes, purchasing approaches, volume, industry classification, business type, and so on. During the segmentation exercise, you should have also evaluated each market segment, constructed segment profiles for each, evaluated the attractiveness of each segment, and lastly, selected your target markets. It is these target markets or segments that we wish to use and expand upon to identify potential customers to interview.

If all we had to do was identify our target markets, our task would be difficult enough. Unfortunately for us, target segments are but one dimension in choosing customers to interview.