The Other Side of History: voice of the customer

Showing posts with label voice of the customer. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Posts from a Business Class

I recently completed a course in total quality management (TQM), and here are all my writings from that class. This was only my second business class, and these classes have one thing in common: their adherence to the "happy path." By this I mean that the textbooks and course material assumed that all involved individuals are perfect angels (except for those of us who reject TQM), and that the world is adorned with sprinkles and populated by unicorns that fart Skittles. For example, advocates of TQM call for "employee engagement," but managers are not prepared for when that truly happens.

Despite this, I do not consider this class to be a waste of my time. When someone asks me "when am I going to use this?" I counter with: "when is it going to use you?" This holds even for business management classes. Plus, those classes have a perverse entertainment factor: there is enough that is correct about TQM that when it goes wrong, it is worth observing, like a slow motion car accident.

To put a bow on all this, I present this list of posts. They are grouped by topics, and are also placed in the order they were written during this eight week course. There are some new ideas, some humor, and some criticism. Mostly, though, these posts are about connecting business management topics to the concepts I find interesting.

General Criticisms of TQM

New and Interesting Concepts

Humor

Military/Militia-Related

Voice of the Customer (VOC) and when Vox Populi is not Vox Dei

Just-in-Time Manufacturing

Leadership and Management

Week 1

Getting Started with Total Quality Management

Week 2

Culture, Ethics, and Strategic Alliances

Week 3

Leadership, Customers, and Employees

Week 4

Teams, Communication, and Training

Week 5

Quality Tools and Programs

Week 6

Continual Improvement Methods

Week 7

Benchmarking and Implementation of TQM

Week 8

Application of Quality Theories

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Management Paralysis and the Good Idea Fairy

Because both total quality management (TQM) and the Malcolm Baldrige approach both require that companies and organizations use a “fact-based” or “evidence-based” or “data driven” approach to setting strategy and making decisions, some type of integrated performance measurement system (El Mola and Parsaei, 2010) seems like a requirement for ongoing operations. [By the way, there apparently is something called “evidence-based medicine.” Going on those words alone, one must shudder at the opposite. But, if anything is true, it is that when words are used to obscure, one must wait for the truth and real intentions to be revealed.]

An integrated performance measurement system must be action-oriented, meaning that not only can it be used to track performance but can also be used to identify slow-downs, excessive costs, and other areas that require improvement.

In addition, an integrated performance measurement system must be able to measure performance based on processes that span across an entire company or organization and not be relegated to single departments. That’s called a process-oriented metric. It is not clear whether an integrated performance measurement system can propose a restructuring of an organization or company so that these cross-department processes do not cross so many departments, and whether such a restructuring is eventually worth it.

The voice of the customer (VOC) and market forces must be considered in any quality management system such as TQM and Malcolm Baldrige approach. Parast et al. (2024) imply that some companies or organizations have a difficult time converting those into actionable items. Instead of a customer-satisfaction loop or a market-analysis loop, companies get stuck in what engineers call “analysis paralysis” – they never make it pass the data collection stage.

Something similar to this is what I call “management paralysis.” This is when management hasn’t developed strategy for some product, or when old management leaves the company and takes their strategies with them. Goetsch & Davis (2021, p. 295) use the phrase “voice of the company,” and with management paralysis, the voice of the company is mute.

Here is a good example: in October 2021, Apple introduced a “notch” in the screen of their MacBook and MacBook Pro products. The idea is that this notch would be a place to hold higher resolution cameras, as well as face tracking and face detection technology. Here we are in August 2025 and none of that has happened. One must conclude that the Good Idea Fairy paid a visit to some mid-level manager and gave him the "vision" of putting the notch into otherwise outstanding computers, and either there was a change in management or an underbaked strategy. Or, the Good Idea Fairy is paid by the hour!

References

El Mola, K. & Parsaei, H. (2010). Integrated performance measurement systems: A review and analysis. The 40th International Conference on Computers & Industrial Engineering, Awaji, Japan, 2010, pp. 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCIE.2010.5668237

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

Parast, M. M., Safari, A., & Golgeci, I. (2024). A comparative assessment of quality management practices in manufacturing firms and service firms: A repeated cross-sectional analysis. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 71, 4676-4691. https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2022.3221851

Ignoring the Voice of the Customer

The voice of the customer (VOC) is the driving force behind Quality Function Deployment (QFD), and it sets the direction for a company to improve its products, satisfy its customers, and respond to the competition (Goetsch & Davis, 2021, p. 290). There are many ways this can go wrong. For example, the individuals comprising the VOC may be in conflict - whis is addressed by Xiao & Wang (2024). Another way is that the VOC is misrepresented - this is described in another post on this blog. A third way this can go wrong is when a company completely ignores the VOC, when the vox populi is not the vox Dei.

For this post I was going to write about the process by which the U.S. military decided to use the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) in Iraq. Insurgents soon learned that the HMMWV and other vehicles were vulnerable from below to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). U.S. troops modified the HMMWVs and other vehicles to improve survivability by adding sandbags to the floor (Haji sandbags) and welding scrap metal to the bottom. We don’t know whether the QFD process was used in choosing the HMMWV, but the VOC certainly did not include input from anyone with experience in asymmetric warfare, where attacks from unexpected directions is a rudimentary and fundamental tactic.

Beyond that one observation, for now, I have nothing more to write on that subject, but there are numerous other examples where the VOC is minimized or misinterpreted. I do have something to write about a more recent example where the VOC was completely ignored...

Consider the 2024 “Copy Nothing” advertising campaign for Jaguar Cars (Jaguar, 2024). This campaign was launched on 19 November 2024 to announce their conversion to an all-electric brand. This conversion was not mentioned in the ad itself, nor was the fact that the ad was even for an automotive manufacturer until the word “Jaguar” appeared at the very end, in a new font and without the stylized image of a leaping jaguar that used to be their logo.

Instead, the advertisement begins with elevator doors opening onto a barren wasteland of a set. Stepping from the elevator are various stunning and brave gender-ambiguous runway models each feigning purposefulness but are really just displaying a mixture of smugness and boredom. Next, there are scenes of the models alongside the phrases “create exuberant,” “live vivid,” “delete ordinary,” “break moulds,” and “copy nothing.” The models then walk out of frame and the name of the brand is finally revealed.

The soundtrack to all this has a heavy beat, which represents the heartbeats of Jaguar stockholders as they experience cardiac arrest upon watching this ad.

Immediately, the advertisement became more popular than the Jaguar car brand itself, and indeed it became an embarrassment to Jaguar. Talk show hosts lampooned it, it was roasted on social media, and people used AI to add a jaguar back into the commercial – with the jaguar attacking the models! (Sunrise Video, 2024)

The traditional customer base of Jaguar consisted of people going for the “James Bond aesthetic.” Even when attempting to attract new customers, existing customers must not be forgotten – they are still customers, and their voices must be part of the VOC. The “Copy Nothing” ad campaign went further: Jaguar not only ignored the traditional base but seemed to reject them. This is verified in an interview with Rawdon Glover, managing director of the automaker, who stated that “We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently. We wanted to move away from traditional automotive stereotypes” (Brady, 2024).

Jaguar sales dropped 97.5% in Europe following the rebrand (Singh, 2025). The automaker cut 500 management jobs in the United Kingdom, and Adrian Mardell, the CEO of Jaguar’s parent company JLR, will be retiring at the end of this year (Creed, 2025).

It is not clear why some corporations ignore the VOC. Kolarska & Aldrich (1980) note that managers and leaders can become highly unresponsive when a company is in decline, and one of the reasons for this is that formally loyal customers have switched brands (“exited”). In that case, the VOC itself is harder to interpret because there are fewer customers, so the “smoothing” approach taken in Xiao & Wang (2024) is less effective in arriving at consensus.

Research by Xueming (2007) has shown that customer negative voice in the form of complaint records hurts a company’ stock price and concludes that “investments in reducing consumer negative voice could indeed make financial sense in terms of promoting firm-idiosyncratic stock returns.” This should come as no surprise.

Neither of these reasons – declining customer base or unhappy customer base – is enough to explain why Jaguar approved the “Copy Nothing” ad campaign. Further, the experiences of other brands that “went woke,” such as Bud Light’s 2023 partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, provide direct evidence that nothing good can come from Jaguar’s style of rebranding. One must therefore conclude that their actions were nothing other than corporate suicide.

References

Brady, J. (2024, 23 November). Jaguar boss hits out at 'vile hatred and intolerance' after car fans turned on firm's widely-ridiculed woke rebrand. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14117385/jaguar-boss.html

Creed, S. (2025, 1 August). On the move: Jaguar Land Rover boss behind ‘woke’ pink rebrand to quit after campaign saw carmaker universally panned. The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/36107702/jaguar-land-rover-boss-quits-woke-rebrand-backlash/

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

Jaguar. (2024, 19 November). Jaguar | Copy nothing [Video]. You Tube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLtFIrqhfng

Kolarska, L. & Aldrich, H. (1980). Exit, voice, and silence: Consumers' and managers' responses to organizational decline. Organizational Studies 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/017084068000100104

Singh, E. (2025, 3 July). Woke woe: Jaguar sales plummet 97.5% after fierce backlash over woke pink ‘rebrand’ that left fans slamming ‘nonsense’ EV. The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/35669921/jaguar-sales-plummet-woke-pink-backlash/

Sunrise Video. (2024, 30 November). New Jaguar commercial part 2 [Video]. You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9awWSN-h1es

Xiao, J. & Wang, X. (2024). An optimization method for handling incomplete and conflicting opinions in quality function deployment based on consistency and consensus reaching process. Computers and Industrial Engineering 183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2023.109779

Xueming, L. (2007). Consumer negative voice and firm-idiosyncratic stock returns. Journal of Marketing 71(3). https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.71.3.075

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.

Quality Function Deployment

Introduction

This post explains how Quality Function Deployment (QFD) could be used in a software company. QFD makes (some) sense for improving existing products, but not for new products, unless that new product is a copy of a competitor’s product. For this thread it is assumed that the goal is to improve an existing product.

For this example, imagine we work for a software company called Gaggle dot Com, and one of our products is an online email service called GaggleMail, which is completely not a copy of Google’s Gmail. In this post the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method is applied to GaggleMail to improve its quality and increase customer satisfaction.

The Problem with QFD’s Math

Goetsch & Davis state “The math used to establish priorities lacks the precision necessary for a Six Sigma company” (p. 289). A “Six Sigma company” is not defined, nor is the actual meanings of the calculations involved in QFD. Take for example the value engineering equation (Goetsch & Davis, p. 290):

V = F/C

Where V represents value, F is function, and C is cost. What exactly are the units on these three variables, and how exactly are they measured? The purpose of this, along with the other calculations in QFD, is to give the appearance of quantitative understanding, and would be immediately rejected by the technical employees involved as being nothing but smoke and mirrors.

This post takes a different approach, using popularity for ranking the desired features of a software product, which is similar to the approach taken in Wong et al, (2023). This method may be incorrect, but at least technically minded people can remain engaged.

Step 1: Developing the Set of Customer Needs

Because there are so many parts to an online email service, it is decided that the focus will be on improving the user interface (UI) of GaggleMail.

After the scope is determined, the next step is to choose a cross-functional QFD team with members from development, customer support, graphic design, marketing, sales, and other relevant departments. All the team members should be somehow invested in the product under review. This is a problem at large software companies like Gaggle dot Com – there can be so many products that some employees do not use them all.

This team would prepare an online questionnaire, which can include initial guesses from the team about what the users want or need, along with free-form input for unanticipated needs. Team members who work in customer support will provide the most valuable input. For each of the initial guesses, we wish to determine two pieces of information: importance of improving the feature for the customer, and customer satisfaction with the existing feature.

The number of users to which this questionnaire is sent depends on the total size of the user base: if there are hundreds of thousands of GaggleMail users, then there would be too many responses to analyze. It would make sense to choose the users carefully. The users should be what are called “super users” – users that use GaggleMail heavily and are enthusiastic about the product. A second, separate, qualification to receive the questionnaire is that the recipient will not pass information on to competitors, and that they do not enter misleading information that would degrade the quality of the product. This type of security is hard to control except (maybe) in an in-person focus group.

The responses to the questionnaire represent the voice of the customer (VOC).

The QFD team will then sort and prioritize the responses to the questionnaire, including user input that doesn’t fit into the predefined questions. The responses can be written onto three-by-five cards and then arranged into an affinity diagram (Goetsch & Davis, p. 291) or into a tree diagram. An affinity diagram would be best, as the three-by-five cards can either be physically grouped or tallies can be written on them to record the number of people who are interested in a feature. This can then be translated into a table listing the customer needs (WHATs) and the corresponding importance for each need, rated on a 1 to 5 scale – where the numbers (ranks) come from the popularity of the requests for improvements.

Since the UI of GaggleMail is the thing under consideration, requests for changes to non-UI features (like over-abundance of spam in the In Box and valid emails in the Spam folder) can be ignored. This information should not be thrown away, but instead should be saved for non-UI improvements.

Step 2: Planning the Improvement Strategy

The second step is to compare our product against the competition. This can be done by a focus group or by sending a questionnaire to users of a competing product, using the same customer needs matrix from stage 1. This should be done for two prime competitors (Goetsch & Davis, p. 293).

The competitors’ customer satisfaction (CS) on each feature is again ranked 1 to 5.

This information is entered into the Planning Matrix: the first column should be the CS rating of our own product, and the second and third columns are for the CS ratings for the two competitors.

The company should then decide what should be the desired ranking (called level of improvement on p. 293 of Goetsch & Davis) for each customer need. There isn’t an objective way of determining this, but several factors must be considered: the time and money required to implement this feature, how valuable it is to the customer, and the CS rankings of the two competitors for the same feature. These rankings are entered into the Planning Matrix in the fourth column, called “Our Planned CS Rating.”

Step 3: Selecting the Technical Requirements

This step can be called creating the "voice of the company" (Goetsch & Davis, p. 295). In it, technical requirements are generated from the VOC findings. These requirements are descriptions of HOW to implement the desired changes to GaggleMail.

Step 4: Evaluating Interrelationships Between WHATs and HOWs

At this step, the relationships between the customer needs (step 1) and the technical requirements (from step 3) are made. The interrelationships between the two are placed into a matrix (Goetsch & Davis, p. 297), ranked 0 of 5, where 0 means that there is no relationship between a particular customer need and a particular technical requirement, and a 5 means that there is a direct relationship between the need and the requirement.

Step 5: Evaluating the Correlation Between the HOWs

The fifth step involves the creation of the Correlation Matrix that indicates the relationship between each pair of technical requirements. These relationships can be classified into being supporting, impeding, or no correlation. (Goetsch & Davis, p. 298). A Correlation Matrix would be useful if the changes involve multiple teams (in the text’s example this would be the authors, graphic designers, book binders, etc.). In the context of a software company like Gaggle.com, these correlations would be better understood if a dependency graph were used. Using such a graph, the dependency between each task would be obvious, tasks that can be done in parallel can be identified, critical paths can be determined, and so on (Tannenbaum, p. 274-309).

Step 6: Setting the Design Targets

In this last stage, targets for improvement (design targets) are specified. As in earlier steps, none of the calculations in this step (Goetsch & Davis, p. 298-303) make any sense.

Conclusion

Now, after all this is done, work can (finally) proceed on making the desired changes. In a company with minimal bureaucracy, development can proceed following the completion of step 1 and step 2, saving weeks or months in a highly competitive industry.

As mentioned in the introduction, QFD would work best for improving existing products. However, there are some situations that are not addressed in Goetsch & Davis.

First, there is no explanation of how to manage cases of conflicting VOC needs (Xiao & Wang, 2024). For example, suppose some customers want the text in Gaggle Mail to be larger, others want it to be smaller, and some customers want the text to be visible to those who are color blind. In a real software company, the developers and graphic designers would devise a solution that allows all customers to be happy.

A second missing aspect, at least in Goetsch & Davis, is the situation where a competitor has a feature that is not in Gaggle Mail. It could be addressed in the questionnaire designed in Step 1, but what if it goes unnoticed?

Finally, the success of the improvements to Gaggle Mail are not considered in Goetsch & Davis. This is not unexpected since actual work only begins after the QFD analysis is complete. With Gaggle dot Com, or really any company, the changes would be evaluated by some of the people that determined the VOC in step 1. Without this, the QFD analysis as well as actual work on Gaggle Mail can result in what software engineers call “ready-fire-aim.”

References

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

Tannenbaum, P. (2007). Excursions in Modern Mathematics with Mini-Excursions (6^th ed.). Pearson.

Wong, J. et al. (2023). New approach for quality function deployment based on social network analysis and interval 2-tuple Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic information. Computers and Industrial Engineering 183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2023.109554