Voices into Choices: Acting on the Voice of the Customer

Traditional market surveys have limited value, and dartboards and magic can lead you astray. It's time to change how you connect with your customers. Value and true insights are gained when you go to their environment. Listen, observe, and explore your customers' world.

However, listening to your customers is often the easy part. Knowing how to leverage and turn that information into tangible products, services, and management practices is the challenge. Voices into Choices: Acting on the Voice of the Customer is the only handbook that gives you a proven and highly effective method for acting on the voice of the customer.

Voices into Choices takes you through the steps to define the issue and collect customer information to provide maximum insight. Then it provides you with three distinct methods for acting on the information, each designed to produce specific outputs.

The handbook is based on real business issues and gives you actual business cases that include:

• Designing a centralized pharmacy for increased levels of service, quality, and financial performance following a merger of four hospitals.
• Developing the inventory and supply operations management program for a large, geographically diverse organization to increase overall efficiency.
• Creating a Web site designed to dramatically increase sales.
• Developing a plan to stem rising benefit costs that addressed both the business and employee needs.
• Identifying the product and market needs for a high-tech company that makes scientific imaging film.

Voices into Choices was written and published through a collaboration between Oriel Incorporated and the Center for Quality of Management (CQM). CQM is a non-profit organization consisting of over 110 member companies and university affiliates. It is in the spirit of mutual learning that CQM members developed and successfully use the FOCUS process which is at the core of this book.

"Voices into Choices provided me with a framework to systematically capture, understand, and convert information from several different customers into a welfare-to-work program that adds value to the lives of individual participants and the community-at-large."

Phil Mercuri, Director-Workforce Readiness Office
Thomas Nelson Community College, Virginia Beach, VA