As a marketer, there are several opportunities in your day-to-day activities where you can collect feedback or customer’s suggestions about a product or service of the company.
Customer feedback is a vital and valuable input and should be treated with the utmost attention.
It can really bring a lot of value to the organization, and that’s the reason for having several tools like surveys, feedback forms, etc… to gather it.
Today I will focus on only a specific sort of input, which is the customer’s suggestions regarding a new product or service. And the risks that are associated with it.
Customer Suggestions On New Products
When collecting the VOC (voice of the customer) as detailed in this previous post and more specifically when interviewing customers as described in these two posts part1 and part2.
Or in other interactions with customers such as: in product presentation, attending surgeries, discussing during courses or congresses, etc… certain customers, especially KOLs, will outrightly tell you how your new product should be, what features it should have, and what technology you could implement.
If you followed and read some of my previous posts by now, you probably know my position on this topic. However, it’s not too late to catch up on all that information.
That said, always remember that it is the job of the development team to define how to solve the customer’s problem. But, it is not the role of the customer to tell the development team how to design the product.
Let me clarify some points:
The Goals Of The VOC (Voice of the customer)
In the already cited paper about the VOC written by Griffin and Hauser, the authors identified four steps of the VOC:
1) identifying customer needs
2) organizing customer needs
3) prioritizing customer needs
4) applying the results with the goal of customer satisfaction
This clearly shows that the objectives of a well-conducted VOC are about the customer’s needs and not solutions.
Griffin and Hauser further clarified the distinction between needs and solutions, as this element is the cornerstone of the VOC.
Keep in mind that the goal of the VOC at the beginning of the development process is to identify problems, needs, and wants, not solutions and product specifications.
Why Is It Not A Good Idea To Listen To Customer Suggestions About New Products?
Listening to customer suggestions could bring several dangers in medical device product development.
The first danger of following KOLs suggestions is that you may end up developing products that satisfy only a limited number of users.
Hence, the inputs from a very influential KOL must always be confirmed with different VOC methodologies and not generalized to the entire market.
In medical devices, it is a common practice to listen to the recommendations of a narrow group of KOLs who would normally have an advanced understanding of the clinical problem, patient’s condition. And are experts in using products to treat this kind of patients.
Since KOLs are not average users, the products that originate from their inputs may not result to be successful. With KOLs, as with all customers, it’s vitally important to understand their underlying needs and not just their suggested solutions.
The second danger of following customer suggestions is with developing incremental innovation and mee-too products.
I think developing a mee-too product is totally fine, as long as it is what your company is looking for.
Aside from some exceptions, surgeons or other caregivers are not that creative; especially, when suggesting solutions.
Normally, they will ask for missing features and solutions already present in competitive products or for something they have already experienced.
The customers are not experts in new technologies either; therefore, it is difficult for them to think about innovative applications of technology.
The third danger of following customer suggestions is that you base your new product or new feature on speculations.
Humans are bad at predicting future behavior because they think about an ideal situation and consider the choice isolated from the context.
For the customer, when suggesting a “solution,” it can be very difficult to consider all other environmental factors that can influence the moment of the choice.
For example, some customer suggestions could mean adding a new feature to an existing product, and they’ll back it up by saying that it will justify an increased product price.
When implemented you could discover that the market considers the value created by the new feature to be insufficient compared to the increase in the product price.
How Should You Treat Customer’s Suggestions?
Here, I’ll explain what you can do when customer suggestions arise during a VOC or other interactions with customers.
First, you should not be distracted by the objective of your activity. If the goal of the VOC is to identify customer needs and wants, you should not deviate from this goal.
However, if suggestions arise during the interview, use the opportunity to investigate the underlying need.
Follow up by asking these sorts of questions:
- Why do you want that?
- Why is it necessary for you to use this specific feature/functionality/product etc…?
- How are you coping today with this?
- What would that feature/functionality/product etc… provide you?
It is a misunderstanding of the VOC role when we assume or accept that the customer hands us the solution to the level of the detailed features and design specifications.
You will not do a good service to customers by acting on what they say.
Instead, you should seek to have a better understanding of what they are actually trying to convey.
This is one of the reasons why VOC matters and why you should go beyond the surface and try to uncover the true needs, wants, and motivations that will drive product results.
On a final note, if you’d like to know more about customer suggestions, sales, and marketing for medical devices, hit the subscribe button, and you will be among the first to be notified on my next post.