Is Six Sigma Hijacking the Real Customer?

We've lost sight of who our customers really are.

Pick up any article or book, attend any conference on Six Sigma, or talk with any Black Belt or Master Black Belt and you will hear the Six Sigma gospel about the importance of the voice of the customer. For example, in their book Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World's Top Corporations (Currency Random House, 2000) authors Mikel Harry and Richard Schroeder argue, "The heart of Six Sigma lies in improving products and services what will benefit the customer. Companies need to understand how their customers measure quality and to create products and services that meet their expectations." (p. 170)

Clearly the authors are referring to the end user or the buyer of the product or service.

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Comments

Violent Agreement

I find myself in violent agreement with Dr. Reidenbach, and I don't think he goes far enough when he writes that internal customers only guess at what real customers care about and sometimes get it right and sometimes wrong.

I spent nearly 10 years of my career doing a lot of joint work with market research firms (I would call on them because they had expertise I did not.) We typically found, over and over again, in every industry segment of the U.S. economy, that ...
A. Most companies believed that they "understand" what their customers need and want.
B. When we checked with the actual customers, we found the companies to be (on average) about 80% wrong!!

So, when our clients asked us to give them a "report card" from their customers, we had to tell them: Not only do you not know what your grades are, you don't know what 80% of the courses you're taking are.

John Gunkler