ISACA COBIT 5 – Define (BOK IV) Part 2

3. Customer Data Collection (BOK IV.A.2)

Hey, welcome back. Earlier we talked about two types of customers, internal and external. And we talked about customer segmentation, the need for customer segmentation and for that we needed data. So here in this section we will be talking about how to collect customer data. There are a number of ways to collect customer related data. Four of these are highlighted here on this slide. The first one is survey. Survey is actually listening to the customer, talking to the customer one by one or sending a survey by email, mail or by phone or a web survey or getting some feedback on the product. So that’s a survey. And then we can have a focus group.

Focus group is where we collect a few people and talk to them in regards to product, what they like, what they don’t like, what they expect from the product. So that’s a focus group where you collect maybe six 7810 people with a similar sort of a group and talk to them related to the product. That’s a focus group. Then we can have interviews with the customer, meetings with the customer. This probably makes sense when you have a less number of customers, for example if you are building a Power project and then those sort of customers you need to meet one to one. And another way to collect data could be observing customer, how the customer is using the product, observations related to that and that’s how you can collect data.

So out of these four methods which are survey, focus group interviews and meeting and observations. On next few slides we will be talking about two of these which is surveys and focus group in a little bit more detail. So let’s move on to surveys on the next slide. So when you want to have a survey, survey could be through phone, through email, through web, through personal talking. The first thing which you need to understand is what is the goal of this survey, what do you want to collect and why you are doing this survey? That needs to be clear before you design your survey. And then in the survey you have a predetermined question. So those questions should be unambiguous. Unambiguous means those should be clear, there should not be a double meaning. Somebody should not be able to misunderstand that question. And many a times people use a scale of one to 10 and this is also called as like a scale. So you can have a survey based on like Earth scale where you can ask number of questions, the response you are expecting on a scale from one to 10, how was the service provided on a scale of one to ten. So that’s how you can design your questions.

And then you need to look at the historical relevance of the survey. So if you have collected this information earlier, make sure that you have a consistency so that you can compare this year’s result with the last year, the year before or the year before that. So your question should be matching with the historical questions as far as possible. In that way you can see the trend where things are moving and then there are open ended questions. In open ended questions you can ask customer details where customer can tell things which are not in your survey, for example, what sort of a feature you would like in this product. So that’s an open ended question which you can ask the customer and customer can give you a number of ideas on that.

So that’s another way of putting question to the customer. These surveys should be reviewed before these are released to the customer. And many times you send these surveys to a smaller population first, maybe within the company, just to make sure that everyone understands the same thing. And once you have done that pilot test, then you can send this survey to your target audience. Once you receive back the survey results, you can analyze that. And one drawback of this method of customer data collection is number of times you get a less response.

So if you send 100 surveys, you might end up in getting ten surveys filled in back. So companies might want to put some reward, some incentive that you might enter into a draw for $100, Amazon gift coupon or something. So that is to motivate people to fill in the surveys coming to the next method of data collection, which is focus group. So in a focus group, a group of people generally could be from six to ten or could be more or less, but with a similar sort of opinion, similar sort of a perception are called together and there is a discussion. So there is a person who is a skilled person and who will run this focus group talk to these people related to product features, product quality, product performance. So that’s a focus group to collect customer feedback or the customer data.

So when you have a focus group, there could be three types of questions which a skilled moderator will use. So the first type would be engagement questions. So engagement question will be to start engagement with this group. So for example, I am preparing this Six Sigma course and I want to have a focus group where I called in six or eight people in a room and talked to them related to this Six Sigma Black Belt Online course. So what I will be starting with is engagement question. Engagement questions such as why you want to take this course.

Are you appearing for a Six Sigma Black Belt exam or is it going to help you? What way you think it’s going to help you? So those sort of openended questions I can ask as a engagement questions just to engage that group into discussion. And then you can ask for exploration questions. So exploration questions are actually the main questions which you want to ask how much value you give to quizzes in the course? Would you like a short duration lecture, maybe five minutes or less? Or would you like 15 to 20 minutes length of videos? So that could be another question. So these sort of questions are the main questions which probably I would want my customers to tell me. And then once I have done with that, then I will be asking some exit questions. So exit questions are open ended questions to take feedback from my customers. That what all they are looking for in this course, how I can make this course most useful for them. So that could be exit question.

So that’s how you conduct a focus group asking three types of questions engagement, exploration and exit questions. So, once you have collected data from your customers, either through survey or through interview or through focus group, whatever way you collected data, you want to make sure that data is valid and reliable. Many times you buy this data from outside companies. There also you need to make sure that the data which you are buying from an outside survey company is valid and reliable. And what is valid and what is reliable? Valid is when data being recorded is what it was intended to be or how closely the results corresponding to the true state of thing being measured. So the data which you are getting should not be giving a false positive or false negative thing.

If people dislike your product, you should be able to get that information, then your data is a valid data, the exact response what you wanted. If you are getting that, then you’re getting the valid data. And reliability is related to when the method of data collection lead to consistent results, then it is a reliable data. So, for example, if I have surveyed 20 students to collect data related to my online Six Sigma course and next time I talk to another 20, that shouldn’t be giving absolutely different results. If the results which are coming totally inconsistent, then your data is not not reliable. You cannot rely on that. That is what reliability means here. So in this section, we talked about how to collect data using surveys, using focus groups, interviews, observations, and we looked at what does data validity and reliability means.

4. Customer Requirements – Introduction (BOK IV.A.3)

Hey, welcome back. Earlier we talked about customer needs and expectations and we found those things using tools such as survey, using focus groups, interviews, et cetera. So we collected some data using these tools such as Survey, focus group interviews or observations. Now, what do we do with this data with this information? We need to analyze that to analyze to find out what customer really needs. So that’s what we will be learning here in this section, how to analyze the needs and requirements of the customer. For example, if I’m looking for customer feedback on this course, on this Six Sigma Black Belt Course, what does Customer need? My customers are people who want to learn Six Sigma. My customers are people who want to appear in some competitive exams. Such as? American Society for Quality Certified Six Sigma Black Belt Exam. So what do these people need? Do they need a comprehensive course? Probably yes. That’s what I learned from Interview, that they need a course which is comprehensive, covering all aspects of the subject. And people want quizzes built into that quizzes to test their knowledge, whether they have understood the topics or not, quizzes to practice for the exam. And they want to have this interesting in terms of simple and plain language rather than making it too complicated with the big business jargons.

So they want to keep it simple and interesting with a common sort of examples rather than complicated examples, and people want to keep it practical. So that’s what I learned from using these tools which are Survey, Focus Group, Interview or any other method. So to understand the needs and expectations of customers, there are various tools available. Let’s learn about some of these tools here. Tools here are voice of the customer then critical to X and one of the critical to acts is critical to quality. So we will be looking more into Critical to Quality.

Then you can have a tool such as Quality Function Deployment, which is a very important tool in quality Management. Then you can use cyproc. SIPOC is supplier, input, process output and customer. So putting all these things on a piece of paper will help you understand the overall process. And then there is a canoe model of customer Satisfaction. So let’s go through these topics one by one, starting with the Voice of Customer. What does Voice of Customer mean? Let’s see the at on the next slide.

5. Customer Requirements – VOC and CTQ (BOK IV.A.3)

So when we say Voice of customer, so the voice of Customer is the term used to describe the indepth process of capturing customers expectations, preferences and aversions. What customer likes, what customer dislikes, those could be stated or those could be unstated needs of the customer. So that is what voice of customer means. Voice of Customer is a vague term. So when you look for voice of Customer, the output of this will be slightly vague. It’s not something which is concrete or which is very clear. So voice of customer will always be in vague terms. You need to make it more specific, more specific so that you can take specific actions on those. But in general, whatever customer needs are, whether stated or unstated, are voice of customers. With this understanding, let’s move on to the next topic which is critical to X. Let’s see that on next slide.

So, once you have looked at customer requirements, what does customer wants? Then you can segregate those things based on number of these factors, factors such as quality, safety, cost, et cetera. And we call those as critical to X. So critical to X is critical to quality, critical to safety, critical to cost, et cetera, et cetera. Here in this we’ll be focusing more on critical to quality on the next slide. But when we say critical to X so these are customer requirements which have been filtered based on the topic here. The topic in critical to quality will be the quality. So need. Customer needs which are related to quality are critical to quality. So when we say critical to X, critical to X basically is looking at customer requirements, breaking them, flagging them and taking those into consideration.

So that’s critical to X. Let’s move on to the next slide and talk about critical to quality. What are the requirements? Critical to quality? And there we will look at one example of that as well to understand this concept in a little bit more detail. So, going back, as I was telling earlier, that voice of customer is vague and it is difficult to define. And that is where critical to X, or in this case critical to quality comes into picture. So when we look at voice of customer, the customer needs could be difficult to measure directly.

Those customer needs need to be broken down into smaller pieces so that those things make sense to the business, the requirements which make sense to the business requirements which are measurables requirements on which the organization can take some action. So critical to quality CTQ are customer requirements which have been broken down into measurable actionable items. On the next slide, let’s take an example of a hospital. So here we have an example of how you convert the voice of customer into Ctqs or critical to quality. So, starting with the voice of customer here in this example, which is an example of a hospital, the voice of customer or the need of customer is to have good service in clinic. So that’s a very broad statement that the customer wants a good service in the clinic.

So now what are the drivers for? That where we break down this voice of customer into smaller pieces and which are timely. So customer is looking for timely service, customer is looking for cleanliness and customer is looking for low cost. So these were some of the drivers which were for good service in clinic. Now, if you look at timely, if you can further split that into specific parameters, which here are that time for registering to call. If it is less than five minutes, the client is happy. If the time doctor takes for consulting is greater than or equal to ten minutes, that makes customer happy because customer doesn’t want doctor to quickly or hurriedly talk to the patient and get him out the door. Patient wants that doctor should listen to him, give him some time, at least ten minutes.

So these specific parameters, which for example here are in this case are the time, those are critical to quality parameters. So if you look at this CTQ tree, which we call CTQ tree, starting from the voice of customers to the drivers and to the specific Ctqs. So if you look at that, you will see that on the left side where we have a voice of customer, it’s less specific, it’s a broad statement. And as we move right on this tree, the requirements are becoming more and more specific. And same thing on hardness to measure, voice of customer is hard to measure. But once we go to the Ctqs, those are easy to measure and that’s how we create Ctqs. That Ctqs should be easy to measure because if you cannot measure, then you cannot achieve that. And that is how you create a CTQ tree and find out CTQ.

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