Are You Hearing the Voice of your Customers?
The term voice of the customer or VOC is used to describe your customers’ needs, wants, desires, and their perceptions of what they need to get their jobs done. It’s only through skillful research that you can understand your customers’ unique functional requirements so that you can cost effectively design, deliver and improve the products, services and technologies they use.
From my prospective, we are too often missing the VOC of our customers in healthcare. By this statement I mean we aren’t spending enough time or energy identifying our customers. No product, service or technology has just one customer value group, since one size does not fit all customers’ requirements. Consequently, this oversight has lead to massive over-standardization in healthcare. This is costing your hospital, system or IDN hundreds of thousand, maybe even millions of dollars annually.
We see this observable fact with just about every client we work with. Just the other day, one of my consultants uncovered that one of our clients had standardized on three pacemakers, with an average cost of $6,800. When they changed their pacemaker product mix, by adding a few more pacemakers, they lowered their average pacemaker cost to $4,200. The effect! Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year were saved simply by really listening to the VOC.
You too can achieve these kinds of savings by collecting and analyzing data to understand your customers’ practice patterns, trends and variations. You can interview your customers to really understand what they absolutely positively must have to do their jobs and observe how they use their products, services or technologies in the real world. Then and only then, will you be able to say that you truly and wholly understand the voice of your customers.
Filed Under: Best Practices • savingsblog
