Customer-centrism

Customer service is the practice of providing customers with a positive and helpful experience, like a brand, it’s what the customer perceives and remembers of the product they used or the service they received.

So voice of a customer is crucial, it’s the driving factor of any organization to deliver quality products/services, conformance to customer’s needs, and developed products/services demanded in the market.

The “voice of the customer” is a process used to capture the requirements/feedback from the customer (internal or external) to provide the customers with the best in class service/product quality. This process is all about being proactive and constantly innovative to capture the changing requirements of the customers with time.

In customer service provision, the voice of the customer represents the aspects which the customers expect or demand from a product and how this can be translated to more specific relevant aspects of the process, this helps firms prioritize goals consistent to the specific customer requirements.

The customer either internal or external, is always the most important focal point for a Lean Six Sigma project.

Lean Six Sigma’s main goal is organizational survival and/or growth through superior and improving customer satisfaction.

Lean incorporates customers in the supply chain and allows them to pull the product through the supply chain which increases process speed whilst Six Sigma focuses on the customer as a source to define what aspects of a certain process are critical to quality.

The Lean speed and Six Sigma quality are brought together in Lean Six Sigma to be able to fulfill the delivery and process control requirements according to the Voice of the Customer.

Many companies tend to focus much on their revenues and forget to manage the expenses. Many realize the need for being lean just because of the realization of emerging competition and technology capability from rivals or other countries who can produce the same quality product at an extremely lower rate by being more efficient and managing their expenses better.

Most people would agree that customers are the most important part of a business – no customers, no business. In order to be successful, a business must know who its customers are and what the expectations of those customers are for the product or service the business sells. In Six Sigma, that process is known as identifying the voice of the customer (VOC). The key to having success in that process is gathering customer data and converting it into measurable critical-to-satisfaction elements.

 Tony Watima – SigmaStrat