Photo by Lisa @ Sierra Tierra
Photo by Lisa @ Sierra Tierra

We discussed reaching out to our clients to discover their wants by obtaining Voice of client. Critical to Client is the next step. Here we affinitize the Voice of Client and distill what we found into actual, measurable concepts.

Needs vs requirements

A, B, and C are requirements. The customer needs pizza delivered to him or her. They require the delivery to be fast, the delivery person to be friendly, and the pizza to be tasty

Translate to Actionable Critical to Client Measures

The next step is to take those requirements and translate them to actionable measures. This step allows you to see how well you are performing to the specific requirements your customers have.

Ex. Requirement to Specific measures:

  • Fast pizza delivery – Delivered to your door in under 30 minutes after placing the call.
  • Friendly Service – Phone rep uses courteous language; repeat customers are greeted by name.
  • Tasty Pizza – 6 Sigma levels of surveys rate the tastiness of pizza to be 8, 9, or 10 on a scale of 1-10.

One way of translating Voice of Client (VOC) to Critical to Client (CTC) is to view the needs identified and related them to Maslow’s Hierarchy – Basic, Expected, Desired, Unanticipated.

You could also take it from the perspective of the Kano model.

Additionally you could use quality function deployment (QFD) / House of Quality to relate the CTQs to the CTCs.

Now that we’ve translated Voice of Client into specific Critical to Client measures it is time to figure out what our company needs to do in order to achieve those levels of service. We do that by forming and examining Critical to Quality measures.

Comments (6)

Ted

I’m having a hard time finding where Needs and Requirements are defined and the difference between the two. Could you elaborate on this?

Hi Aaron,

I have a light treatment of this above. I’ll add a note to expand in the future. Think of needs as client-centric and requirements as what needs to be true in order for the client needs to have been met.

Was this topic covered in the training that you took before joining this site?

No it was not. I also can’t find any definitions in the glossary or VOC / CTC sections of the ASQ SSGB Handbook either.

Perhaps I’m just not understanding.

This page lists the following as requirements:
-Fast pizza delivery – Delivered to your door in under 30 minutes after placing the call.
-Friendly Service – Phone rep uses courteous language; repeat customers are greeted by name.
-Tasty Pizza – 6 Sigma levels of surveys rate the tastiness of pizza to be 8, 9, or 10 on a scale of 1-10.

Would the “need” here just be for the customer to have pizza delivered to them? Where the specifics about delivery speed, service, and tastiness are “requirements?”

Hi Ted,
In Needs vs requirements explanation it is mentioned that , “A, B, and C are requirements”
What is A,B, and C i cannot found it on this page.

Hi Ehsan,

This page is currently under development. We’ll have a clear treatment here shortly.

For now, I like this quote:

“Customers have needs and requirements. A customer need establishes the relationship between the organization and the customer (example: I need (or want) an iPad). Requirements are those characteristics that determine whether or not the customer is happy.” (source)

Best, Ted

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