“If I would have given my customers what they asked for I would have given them a faster horse.”

The preceding quote has long been attributed to revolutionary industrialist Henry Ford. Much like Ford’s customers, your own, whether existing or future, cannot always articulate everything they’d like to see in the product or services you provide. They also can’t, or won’t, tell you everything that is important to them that might relate to what it is you provide them.

What Ford did was strive to understand the “heart of the customer.” With the current economic landscape, it is even more critical that you differentiate yourself from others — to go beyond what your customer says and explore their daily experience and what it takes to make them successful. You have to push deep to uncover customers’ wants, needs, hopes and fears. As an operational excellence practitioner and consultant for more than 17 years, I have discovered that at the heart of any organizational improvement initiative must beat the heart of your customer.

Just as quality guru W. Edwards Deming stated that “variation is the enemy,” when it comes to understanding the voice of the customer, ambiguity is the enemy. If we accept the premise that customers may not be able to or will not always articulate everything they would like our product or service to do for them, it is our responsibility to find a way to figure it out. Well, here it is.

I have been fortunate enough to become acquainted with and learn from Robin Lawton and his team at International Management Technologies (www.imtC3.com). They have developed a simple yet effective method to truly understand the heart of the customer. His creation of word formulas and linguistic rules enable you to use language with as much rigor as you do with math and to do it with more simplicity. I can’t go into great detail in this article, but I can provide you with some foundational principles that you can build upon.

The Four Questions:

1. What is the product?

2. Who are the customers?

3. What are their expectations?

4. How can we improve?

The No. 1 reason to understand the voice of the customer is so we can answer question No. 4, how can we improve? But doing that is dependent upon first being able to determine what our customers want (question No. 3). Before we do that, we must identify who our customers are, our target market, our niche (question No. 2). But we cannot truly identify our customers unless we first define what it is they are customers for (question No. 1). We are able to truly hear, understand, know, and act upon the heart of the customer to the degree that we can answer these questions. It is only then that an organization’s continuous improvement initiative will be capable of generating the greatest possible outcomes for you and your customers.

Steve Wilson is president and founder of Wilson Consulting & Training Services in Cedar Rapids. He can be reached at swilson@qualitybydesign.biz or (319) 310-3019.