No. 23 in a Continuing Series
| An Ounce of Prevention: VOC in Medical Devices | ||
|
Since we first began helping clients listen to the Voice of
the Customer (VOC) in 1989, Applied Marketing Science
has watched dozens of industries embrace the notion
that customers do not buy features and specifications,
but rather products that solve important unmet needs.
While any company can benefit from understanding the
VOC, medical device firms arguably need it the most.
Why is this so? We see two factors at work. For one, the medical market is highly sophisticated. If your product is a checking account, air travel, or deodorant, it is far easier to see eye-to-eye with your customer, and usually, you know more about your product than your customer ever cares to. Not so with clinicians, who spend years learning and practicing diagnoses and procedures and are experts in every sense of the word. Without similar experience, product developers will always be at a disadvantage in discussions with clinician-customers – customers simply know more. Yet many companies rely on their own intuition, supported by anecdotes from the field, to lead them to a set of “requirements” with little basis in facts and data. Second, medical devices are often highly complex and are always highly regulated, leading to a much longer and more intensive product development effort than in other industries. Devices often require thousands of hours at the engineering bench to get the “science” right, followed by an exhaustive regimen of laboratory and clinical testing to prove safety and efficacy, before a product can even be mentioned to potential customers. A finished device represents a major investment of time and money, the loss of which, should the product perform poorly, can devastate a company and would certainly demoralize the team. |
Most medical device product designers know that
misunderstanding customer needs is a leading cause of
new product failure, yet many still do not invest enough
in systematically capturing and analyzing the Voice of the
Customer. Some lean heavily on advisory panels of
leading physicians, who often move from one company’s
board to the next and rarely represent the mainstream.
Others haphazardly convene a focus group, visit a few
big hospitals, and perhaps commission a web survey,
hoping that what results will be a list of “must-have”
features. Worse still, many simply ignore customers
altogether, focusing on the bench science to develop
cutting-edge technology and then relying on massive
marketing and sales budgets to persuade customers of
their products’ supposed value.
If any of these scenarios sound familiar, perhaps it’s time to rethink how you hear the Voice of the Customer at your company. Leading companies in every industry have adopted formal VOC processes, and many have built deep internal capabilities for executing the research necessary to capture, interpret, and act on customer needs. Yet while best practices do exist, they take time to develop and perfect, and cannot be internalized overnight in any industry. Moreover, medical market research is easy to get wrong and tough to get right, and it is always costly to field. Given all that is at stake, it makes sense to develop a coherent strategy and methodology before undertaking any serious VOC research, and to call in an outside expert for training or consultation when needed. —John Mitchell |
|
| A Better Way to Bundle | ||
|
The affinity diagram is a recognized “best practice” in
New Product Development, earning a reputation as an
efficient and intuitive tool for organizing customer needs
into a logical hierarchy for product planning purposes.
In their landmark article, “The Voice of the Customer”
(1993), Professors Abbie Griffin and John Hauser
concluded that involving customers in creating the
affinity diagram was unequivocally better than leaving it
to the internal product development team – a common
practice both then and now. Taking their advice, many
companies began using customer focus groups to build
the needs hierarchy. Yet Griffin and Hauser suggested
a more rigorous process where a large sample of
customers would individually create affinity diagrams,
which would then be statistically merged using cluster
analysis. This method would reflect the independent
thinking of a larger number of individual customers
and would avoid the “groupthink” mentality inherent
in focus groups. Moreover, by asking participating
customers to choose an “exemplar” need statement
from each of their individual groupings, the process
would provide concrete information from which to
name each of the resulting clusters. At AMS, this
process became VOCALYST®.
Following the explosion of online market research, AMS began to explore moving this exercise to the web. Our goal, first and foremost, was to retain the integrity of Griffin and Hauser’s methodology; online affinitization needed to yield the same level of precision as the original model using paper cards. After years of research and testing various prototypes internally and with several clients, we began offering online affinitization to our VOCALYST clients, introducing several important benefits, including:
|
—Gerry Katz © Copyright Applied Marketing Science, Inc. |
|
