Misrepresenting the Voice of the Customer

In Quality Function Deployment (QFD), input requirements from the customers are translated into a set of customer needs, known as the “voice of the customer.” In small companies, there are very few employees standing between the person who determines the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and the person who implements the recommendations of the QFD analysis. In fact, they may be the same person!

When they are not the same, there is a problem not mentioned in Goetsch & Davis (2021, p. 289-302). The problem is the misrepresentation of the VOC. This can result from incorrect analysis of the customer feedback as presented in the customer needs matrix (Goetsch & Davis, p. 291-292), or it can have nefarious causes.

Here is an example of the latter from a former employer, a once large software company. To explain the situation, four pieces of background information are required. Stay with me.

First, software companies usually attempt to cater to as many people as possible. This requires consideration of the types of computers customers are using (Windows or Macintosh) as well as the browsers they are using (this was in the early 2000s, so it was Internet Explorer and Firefox). To minimize costs, software companies try to develop web pages that work on both Windows and Macintosh and in both types of browsers.

Second, the events described below happened shortly after the bursting of the dot com bubble, when even badly-ran software companies still had money. This attracted ambulance chasers, and a new player entered the chat: litigious companies going after money under the guise of enforcing the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA National Network, 2023). Company management was too spineless to mount a resistance, so these ADA enforcers frequently called the tune within software companies, even down to the level of individual software developers. The situation was very reminiscent of the diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) racket now plaguing universities, organizations, and companies (Lawson, 2025).

Third, there was an extraordinarily strong push for “open source” software, which is software whose internal mechanisms (source code) can be read by anybody. Those advocating open-source software sometimes stand to gain from stealing a competitor’s source code, but in many cases the goal is openness for the sake of openness: most advocates wouldn’t be able to understand the source code even if it were open and easily available.

Finally, the software industry is rife with politics, and not just the usual workplace cattiness. This existed even back in the early 2000s. At present, the level of politics in software companies is turned up to Spinal Tap level 11.

With that background, the nefarious misrepresentation of the VOC can now be described!

“User advocates,” the personification of the VOC, claimed that a certain type of software, Adobe Flash, was unsuitable for use on our web pages. Their reasons were as follows: it was not open source, it was claimed that it was inaccessible under ADA standards, and it was not available to all our users. Because of this, user advocates wanted all the games, financial charting apps, and other engaging user experiences on our websites to be dropped and replaced with other technologies.

An investigation into these claims and recommended actions revealed some disturbing information. While Adobe Flash was indeed closed source, it could be made ADA compliant. Also, only 3% of our users did not have Flash on their computers. For comparison, 10% of our customers used Macintosh computers.

These findings undermined the user advocates’ case for eliminating Flash from our websites. In addition, the user advocates had a visceral hatred of Flash, and those strong emotions compromised their objectivity.

Most damaging to the user advocates was the fact that their proposed actions were simply impractical: viable alternatives to Flash did not exist at the time, and that the user advocates did not consider the costs involved in changing from Flash to a (non-existent) alternative technology.

Further investigation showed that the user advocates had no evidence that customers were indeed calling for the elimination of Flash. Instead, the user advocates were advocating their own beliefs and passing them off as the customers’ voice.

In the end, these user advocates won, sort of. Interactive Flash experiences were sometimes replaced with less interactive experiences, but usually they were simply dropped with no replacements. This spread throughout the industry, and the entire world wide web is now a far less interesting place.

References

ADA National Network. (2023). Americans With Disabilities Act: Enforcement options under the Employment Provisions (Title I). https://adata.org/factsheet/enforcement-options-employment-provisions

Goetsch, D. L. & Davis, S. B. (2021). Quality management for organizational excellence: Introduction to total quality (9^th ed.). Pearson.

Lawson, T. (2025, 14 January). Black is NOT a credential: The corporate scam of DEI. FIG Ink.