| by Louis Columbus
When customers’ needs drive an organization’s quality management agenda, then the organization’s departments, strategies, and initiatives work in sync for success. Harnessing the often complex, at times conflicting, and frequently changing customer requirements is essential for quality management processes and systems to move toward profitable goals. Aligning only with internal performance measurements can lead to shortsighted -- and short-term -- results. Many organizations need to reengineer how the voice of the customer (VOC) influences their objectives and the direction of their quality management, but this requires more than a semiannual visit.
On the other hand, it’s not necessary to create expensive, complex, and difficult-to-administer customer relationship management (CRM) applications. In fact, getting in touch with your customers doesn’t necessarily mean purchasing anything; it’s more about making the commitment to listen to them, developing processes to capture what they think, finding the critical points of product and service quality, and then automating the newly designed processes. This article provides a road map for creating a VOC framework and also offers guidance about which processes you might want to consider automating with CRM software.
Customer relationships aren’t a series of processes that you can improve by throwing money or software at them. These processes require a highly integrated set of strategies that focus on earning and retaining customer trust, working toward long-term loyalty, and increasing the lifetime value of your customers in the process. Quality management directly relates to how customers perceive your company from the touch points that they encounter each day through sales, service, aftermarket products, and warranties.
Integrating a VOC program into a quality management system must begin with the processes defined in the following steps. It’s necessary to make them as efficient as possible by breaking down the old process roadblocks. Business process management should be used for the more complex processes to first analyze and then improve those that touch customers, manufacturing, and quality.
First, prioritize which customer processes are most dependent on quality, and start measuring your performance with them from the customers’ perspective. It’s easy to measure internal processes by your own metrics, but exceeding customers’ expectations using quality as the differentiator is critical.
A prime example is the engineering change order (ECO) process, in which customers’ requirements for a product are defined and communicated to engineering, sales, program management, and quality management for review, modification, and approval, then sent to document control and back to the customer with the changes completed. Although many organizations consider this process purely engineering-based, it’s actually one of the most customer-centric processes manufacturers have. Redefining every process that affects a customer may be unrealistic, but changing how your company interacts with and listens to customers can be easily done. It doesn’t require a significant outlay in software, either. Organizations should invest in CRM software only after the major customer-facing processes, such as ECO management, quality audits, and, on the sales side, quote-to-cash and comparable processes, are streamlined, lean, and efficient.
Second, get to know your customers at both the executive and day-to-day levels. Often when companies initiate VOC programs, they immediately call up the highest-ranking customer contacts that they have, hoping to get a commitment to participate in feedback sessions or even advisory council meetings. Although the roster of executive titles may be impressive in terms of advertising a VOC initiative inside and outside the company, it does little to forward day-to-day process change. Certainly, executive-level advisory councils have their place for strategic changes, large-scale modifications to programs, pricing strategies, services, support, and product life-cycle decision points. For many companies, however, what’s needed isn’t an abundance of strategic vision but a concerted and intense focus on how to improve the many smaller processes that compose customer relationships.
Get in touch with and understand the day-to-day execution challenges facing the customers who are trying to do business with you. Meeting those responsible for day-to-day processes at your customer’s business will give quality problems a name, face, and a direct-dial number -- in short, accountability and visibility. This level of intensity and immediacy of focus on your customers is what you want if change is going to happen. Simply writing a check for software won’t make it happen, but accountability, transparency, and commitments made -- and kept -- to customers will.
Industry experts writing about VOC programs sometimes call this stage "defining touch points," but I argue that it must be more than that. You must seek out the person at your customer’s organization who has a problem and needs you to solve it. If this person has a problem, chances are that other customers will have it, too. That simple exchange represents the beginning of a solid VOC program.
Once you find where your customers interface with you -- the true execution level -- then CRM software can help you track what’s working and what isn’t. Software won’t make you more accountable; relationships definitely will. Software will, however, make it easier to track how well you keep commitments and how the relationships, over time, are progressing.
Third, make it a practice to walk a mile in your customer’s shoes. Spend time, in person, with those people who are responsible for day-to-day process execution at your customer’s business. See how they’re measured on quality by their customers. This is a pivotal point of improving the quality of your customer relationships. Instead of measuring the many quality assurance, quality control, and quality management systems in your own company, go out and spend time with those technicians, analysts, engineers, and managers who rely on your company to deliver quality. Understand how their work is measured from their customers’ perspective and what matters to them in their jobs. Figure out how they can better integrate your company’s quality control and management processes, and how your company can better integrate them. Realize that in the end it’s through your service to customers that your company’s quality management, strategies, and initiatives stay relevant. One may argue that the quality role is always secure, but I argue that unless quality serves customers, it’s not fulfilling its potential to further the health and growth of any organization.
Fourth, create a dashboard based on how your quality affects your customers’ operations, stressing collaboration over individual performance. You want to develop a dashboard of metrics that’s based on what matters most to your customers and how you’re measured on the quality of products and services that you deliver to them. Focus on metrics that measure collaboration across your company and theirs, and share the dashboard and its results with your customers. Create a portal where customers can see your performance relative to their requirements. This is the essence of how partner relationship management began for companies serving their indirect customers, yet from a quality perspective it can be so much more. Consider this portal a transparent view of how you’re performing relative to customers’ expectations. Certainly, each customer’s organization should have its own dedicated portal, but the metrics probably will be common enough across your customer base that only a single set of measures is needed.
This is an area where CRM software can greatly increase the level of performance for many organizations by creating, maintaining, and securely publishing analyses online via portals. Although quality management departments for decades have used statistics and analysis as the foundations of audits, strategies, and initiatives, these tools have become increasingly common in marketing departments. With much higher expectations for marketing departments, analysis has become one of the most rapidly growing areas of CRM software. Thus, many of the applications and tools needed for creating the dashboards recommended in this article are already available. However, there’s no need to look at an enterprisewide CRM application. Instead, look at some of the hosted and software-as-a-service providers, which minimize the up-front costs of establishing a dashboard analysis system.
Quality departments make use of these providers, particularly the customer management portions of the programs, to track the completion and results of audits, and to capture significant customer requirements. Consider, by contrast, an aerospace and defense manufacturer that assigns one of its quality assurance directors to produce a deck of data slides using Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. This takes nearly four days a month to do, even if the director knows the processes so well that he or she runs Excel macros to capture the data. This person could easily save 28 to 30 hours each month. A hosted dashboard could automate this process by integrating to an analysis application and customizing it to the situation.
Fifth, concentrate only on those quality performance metrics that are easily quantified and show collaboration between you and your customer. Go through an iterative cycle of defining these key performance indicators (KPIs) or other performance metrics with your customers. Develop a series of dashboards based on conversations with them and run through a series of data loads to see if the dashboards reflect what your customers are experiencing. You want to build a common set of expectations with your customers and find out how the KPIs and metrics can be better shown. Expect to spend time in a system-implementation phase with these dashboards; don’t just do a "one and done" on this part of your VOC program. Focus on how you can bring change into your organization by providing more relevant service to your customers through the metrics delivered.
Sixth, meet regularly in person to review performance vs. expectations on both metrics and overall execution. Again, focus on those who are responsible for executing initiatives and strategies at your customer’s company and ask how the quality of your products and services serve them. It’s always a good idea to meet in person and see how things are going. Reviewing the dashboard is just part of the discussion. You also want to talk about coordinating on new product introductions, pricing key products and services, and new products and delivery cycles that may affect the customer’s business. Think of this as a regular, informal audit of how your organization fulfills its customers’ needs from a quality management standpoint. Quantifying your company’s contribution to your customers’ quality goals and objectives will highlight your organizational strengths and weaknesses.
Seventh, create improvement projects to turn quality weaknesses into strengths, and publish the schedule of these projects on customer portals. Focus on what can reasonably be changed, keeping in mind that changing how people work will take much longer than simply changing a product or a simple, relatively isolated process. The goal of these improvement projects is to increase quality in the three most critical areas of any organization: people, processes, and products. Focus on how your customers, your quality management department, and your functional areas can align. Determine how quality can become a competitive advantage for your customers, based on your products. Once this happens, lasting and successful change will take place. Best of all, your VOC programs will have paid off.
Software can never deliver the intensity and focus that many organizations need for lasting change to occur. It must begin at a very individual and personal level while simultaneously exploring the major positive effects that the changes will bring to companywide financial performance. VOC programs are essential for helping quality management departments move away from their own metrics and focus instead on what matters most: the metrics that their customers rely on. Only after these processes and peoples’ commitments are in place can CRM software contribute to lasting change. In the end, quality management is only as relevant as the service and contribution it makes to customers outside an organization.
Louis Columbus is a member of the Cincom Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management practice and is a former senior analyst at AMR Research. Columbus has published fifteen books and currently serves as a weekly columnist with crmbuyer.com. He is also currently a lecturer for graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster Loyola-Marymount University, focusing on international marketing strategies, global product introductions, and international expansion strategies.
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