Recently I’ve been discussing with a founder of a MedTech start-up on the importance of collecting the VOC (Voice of the customer) and validating the high-risk hypothesis.
I’ve come to observe that MedTech start-up founders are generally very well equipped with scientific knowledge and technical expertise; however, they lack some expertise in properly interacting with customers.
Start-up teams also come up with smart and creative solutions but they frequently risk missing the right insights to validate their solution and high-risk hypothesis with customers.
While there are many factors to be considered for a successful VOC study, here are my top four:
1. Identify your customer(s)
Before even starting your VOC, it is fundamental to determine who the customer is.
You’ll also need to consider who you need to talk to within the value chain.
For devices with a complex buying process, you might need to collect insights from purchase decision-makers, influencers, buyers, users, etc. while for devices used directly by the patient, the sample can only be composed of patients.
Your objective then is to define the criteria to select the customers so as to identify qualified candidates able to provide credible insights.
For this reason, when you need to validate your hypothesis, you must be specific and determine the complete set of peculiarities of your participants. I always suggest recognizing the early adopters but not limiting your VOC to them.
Your sample must be representative of your target customer. As an example, if your goal is to develop an advanced wound care product to treat major burns, you must talk with HCP working in burn centers where this type of burn is treated.
Also, be sure that you are not just collecting information from key opinion leaders or your key accounts, as I have already explained here. Although the information provided by them is valuable there is the risk of missing the needs of a broader market.
Finally, you must consider the geographical target market since across the countries there might be significant differences.
2. Use multiple proven techniques
Doing a proper VOC requires the use of methods that are proven and applied correctly. There are several different techniques to collect the VOC, in my opinion, customer interviews, customer observations and focus groups are the most powerful and complementary methods. I’ll go over them shortly but keep in mind that taking shortcuts is risky and will not allow you to uncover a complete set of needs and wants.
Customer interviews & ethnography
As discussed previously, customer interviews are extremely effective in exploring customer needs and identifying top-of-mind needs. However, customer interviews are less effective in determining latent customer needs as customers are not necessarily able to articulate all their needs in interviews.
For this reason, customer observation or ethnography is a useful complementary technique to uncover needs that with difficulty will emerge in interviews.
Focus groups
Focus groups are another common mechanism for gathering the VOC. They provide the opportunity to get multiple customers together to discuss their needs and provide direct feedback.
As described here, focus groups require an experienced facilitator to plan, organize, and conduct the session. The sessions are typically one to three hours long and thanks to the group effect they allow the facilitator to collect more and varied needs quickly compared to interviews.
It is important to consider that because of the relatively small number of participants involved, these techniques cannot be expected to be completely representative in a statistical sense of the target market.
Quantitative surveys
Having discussed the qualitative techniques above, i.e. interviews, focus groups, and ethnography, I consider that they are not always appropriate for prioritizing customer pain points and problems and therefore suggest prioritizing the needs with a quantitative survey.
The questionnaire allows respondents to rate the importance and satisfaction of the complete list of needs and not only the ones reported by them. The survey will also help to precisely identify where and what to focus on.
3. Uncover needs
One of the most misunderstood elements of the VOC is the kind of information you need to collect. Frequently companies use the methodologies described before to gather suggestions and solutions from the participants.
That is, they use interviews and focus groups to directly ask the customers which solution they propose regarding a specific area of interest of the company, to collect feedback about their hypothetical solution, or, even worse, to predict and speculate about their future behavior.
The goal of the VOC is to understand and identify the challenges, pain points, needs and wants of the target population. The objective is the problem, not the solution! You should therefore interact with the customers to identify their problems and not ask for solutions.
A customer’s need as I have already mentioned here is “a description, in the customer’s word, of the benefit to be fulfilled by the product or service.” And your uncovered customer needs will be the base for the user requirements of your product.
4. Do not accept a vague answer
Conducting customer interviews is an art and a science and needs some practice to be effective.
One of the most common risks with customer interviews is collecting generic inputs. Often the critics of the VOC complain that customers will provide needs and benefits that are vague and difficult to properly define in order to be really useful for the development team.
For instance, customers might respond with ordinary needs, like “reliable,” “easy to use,” “accurate” or “effective”. However, it is the job of the interviewer to understand what ‘reliable” or other vague terms mean to them.
To reach the correct level of insight during interviews, you must use probing questions to get to the specifics. You should be asking “why” often and require explanatory examples. Only then will you have the information you need to find the user’s pain points.
Conclusion
Collecting the Voice of the Customer is an art and a science; the good news is that most people can learn different techniques to collect useful insights.
Without knowing the possible traps, however, you risk spending a lot of time and effort only to get poor results.
So, whether you are a beginner or an experienced practitioner, following these four suggestions can make the difference between success and failure.
What are your suggestions for an effective VOC study? Share your thoughts in the section below and if you like the content of this blog, hit the subscribe button, and let’s connect on LinkedIn.