LSS Define Phase
Researching your Lean Six Sigma Requirements
Researching your customers follows a natural progression. You start with potentially no information about customers and end up with a collection of quantified prioritized customer needs and expectations.
You might also gain information about how your competitors succeed in meeting their, and your, customer needs.
You start by investigating what information you already have and then determine the ‘gaps’ in your customer information
You then need to develop a customer research plan that moves you from where you are right now to where you need or want to be. Let us talk about the information you currently have and the information you need to get, and how to go about getting it.
If you have no information, you will want to interview or set up a focus group to determine what is important. From this, you will establish the customer wants and needs in terms of general ideas, and prioritized, not clarified data – all of it qualitative.
If you know preliminary customer wants and needs, then you will want to establish which are most important. And in doing so you will clarify them and prioritize these needs one establishing their competition.
If you already have qualitative, prioritised customer wants and needs, then you have used several research methods. Such as surveys, face to face, written email, or other electronic forms.
From this, you will get quantified, prioritized customer wants and needs as well as comparative information on their competitors.
So if you have no information, to begin with, the first step is interviewing some represented in customers, or perhaps the main focus group, to help you understand what is important to them in this service or product you are offering.
You should be able to capture some general ideas about their wants and needs, though these are unlikely to be totally clear, and you probably will not be able to prioritize them yet.
This first step helps you determine your customer’s preliminary needs and enables you to now undertake some more detailed interviews or focus groups.
You will want to determine more detailed analysis to gain a clearer picture of your customer requirements, and at least a preliminary prioritization of them. This will give you the opportunity to ask the customers about their experience with your competition.
Your interviews and focus groups will have been wrong with a relatively small number of customers. This approach is known as qualitative research.
You now need to test their views and opinions by conducting research with a larger number of customers. This approach is described as quantitative research involving a survey.
Quantitative research is important as is enables you to feel confident that you have a true picture of customer wants and needs.
The results from the qualitative research may have been skewed in some way if you have inadvertently included unrepresentative customers.
Planning your research
The customer may offer you a ‘solution’ rather than its address the real needs. So, ask ‘why you won’t have this?’ Until you truly understand the real need.
Different customers may receive the same product or service differently. An example here is including the designer’s logo or not.
Remember that how your customers say they will use a product or service is not always the same as how they use it!
External customers generally express ‘effectiveness needs’. These are needs’ that relate to the value of the customer receives from the product or service.
Internal customers tend to express ‘efficiency needs’.
These are needs’ that relate to the number of resources allocated for consumed in meeting the customer’s needs.
Find out the big picture – hop on over to Lean Six Sigma Foundations – The Projex Academy
