No. 35 in a Continuing Series
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A Pound of Cure |
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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. - By John Mitchell About the author: John was a Principal at Applied Marketing Science when he wrote this article. Currently he is the Director of Customer Insight for Vistaprint North America, based in Lexington, MA. |
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