Silence the Voice of the Customer
Tony Ulwick
Mar 25, 2011
Using voice of the customer (VOC) techniques as a tool for innovation just doesn’t work. According to VOC experts, customers do not know all their needs; they have latent needs and needs they cannot articulate; their needs change quickly over time. This thinking makes finding that Holy Grail of marketing, the “unmet customer need”, nearly impossible. VOC just isn't the right tool to get the job done.
But what if you could know all your customer’s unmet needs? Here is the answer: instead of failing 80 percent of the time, companies will succeed in their innovation efforts 86 percent of the time.
How do we know this? Because over the past 20 years we have created and refined an innovation process called Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI) that provides insights into customer needs that VOC can’t. In addition, a ten-year track record study reveals this approach has an 86 percent success rate.
Our thinking has been adopted by many of the world’s most innovative firms including Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, 3M, GE and IBM. It has been published in the Harvard Business Review and cited by leading academics in over 200 publications.
Learn more about our methodology by downloading this white paper, "Silence the Voice of the Customer." You can also contact us at (866) 729-8400 to learn how we can help you discover your customer needs.
