AN EXPLORATORY STUDY INTO PROCESS FAILURES DURING THE VOICE OF CUSTOMER PROCESS IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

This paper examines the Voice of the Customer (VOC) as a functional process in order to better understand why the process fails and to generate insights into avoiding these pitfalls. The importance of the VOC in product development has been well documented. However, even with this understanding, many product development failures are still rooted in a failure to effectively integrate the VOC into the organization's respective decision-making processes. It is the objective of this paper to study this issue more in depth. First the role of the VOC in product development will be explored and a functional model of the VOC process will be proposed. This functional model will serve as the basis to identify ways in which the process could fail. This analysis will be augmented with a case study that identifies additional failure modes of the VOC process. The paper concludes with some research questions to address these shortcomings that would be of interest to the product development community.