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Using Customer Feedback in Project Selection

How to ensure your Lean Six Sigma projects are properly focused on improving customer satisfaction

We all know that 'Voice of the Customer' is at the heart of Lean Six Sigma philosophy, but how can we ensure that it is also at the heart of our project selection methodology?

This article will suggest some ways achieving this.

It will start with a discussion on ‘who is our customer’. It will then suggest some ways of gathering customer feedback, analysing it and using it to suggest project ideas. It will cover the use of qualitative and quantitative feedback.

It will also suggest ways of prioritising and selecting emergent Lean Six Sigma projects ready for launch by the Belts.

Who is the Customer?

Before we begin our discussion of the use of customer feedback in project selection we should first be sure of who our customer is? This may initially seem to be somewhat obvious, but deeper consideration may show that this is not always the case.

Say, for example, your product is sold to another company. In this case your product may have been designed and specified by a designer, you as a supplier may have been selected by a purchaser and the product used by a shop floor operative. Which of these is your customer? In fact all three have a stake in this and all three may need to be considered.

What if you are involved in a subassembly process, or a support or administrative function? In this case your customers may be internal. The customers of a subassembly process lie in the assembly process itself; those of the support or administrative function are those within or without the organisation who use the facility or its output.

During Green Belt and Black Belt training we use the SIPOC tool to determine who our customers are. (SIPOC stands for Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer). This tool highlights the fact that our customers are those who use or consume the outputs of our process. Each output may have a separate customer and/or each output may have more than one customer.

How do I gather Customer Feedback?

Once you have identified who your customers are you then need to gather their feedback, this is the ‘Voice of the Customer’ in Lean Six Sigma speak.

Customer feedback is typically gathered by means of:

• Interview
• Focus Group
• Survey

Interview

This is a methodology for collecting customer feedback using face to face or telephone contact. It is usually used to learn about a particular customer segment. It is typically used to get in-depth information from a single customer at a time, and where you require detailed contextual feedback.

Focus group

This is a research method which brings together a small group of customers to uncover their feedback under the guidance of a trained moderator. It is typically used to capture a collective point of view from several customers at a time to explore the feedback of specific customer segments. It is reflection oriented and enables the organisation to understand factors influencing segment needs, wants and delights. It is often used as a follow up after interviews or as an introductory step to a big survey effort.

Survey

This is a research method used to gather valid, reliable and useful feedback that can help quantify customer wants, needs, issues and opinions. It is particularly useful as a way of measuring changing feedback and to ensure traceability. It is therefore often used to baseline current customer opinions by means of statistically valid information from a large population to compare with post project feedback.

How do I analyse qualitative Customer feedback?

Customer feedback from interviews and focus groups will typically be in the form statements, and there may be many hundreds of them. Turning these into useful inputs to the project selection process is achieved by means of an ‘affinity process’.

The affinity process is best undertaken by a multidisciplinary team consisting of Managers, Supervisors, Belts and Operatives. It is usually facilitated by a Master Black Belt or experienced Black Belt.

The Affinity process explained:

Step 1

All the statements should be transferred to ‘post-its’ one statement per ‘post-it’. It is important that long or multi-dimensional statements are broken down so that there is only one idea, suggestion, observation or criticism per ‘post-it’.

Step 2

Team members are then instructed to take ‘post-its’ one at a time and to stick then onto a wall. If any comment, suggestion or criticism has some affinity with another already on the wall then the team member should stick it directly underneath it; if not then a new line is created. This step is best done in silence as this is more effective and efficient.

Step 3

Team members are asked to sort each affinity so that general and conceptual points are at the top, whilst detailed ones are at the bottom. This is best undertaken in subgroups or pairs, and team members are encouraged to discuss with each other during this process. New affinities may be created during this step as no affinities should be forced.

Step 4

The subgroups or pairs then pick a statement of feedback which somehow ‘captures this affinity’ and they then place this on top. If none can be found then one can be created.

Step 5

The affinity process in now completed, but the affinitsed groups now need to be prioritised. This can be most easily achieved by counting the number of ‘post-its’ in each affinity. If necessary this prioritiation can be verified by means of a focus group.

How do I generate project opportunities from the affinities?

The wider team then brainstorm possible Lean Six Sigma projects designed to address the points raised in the affinities. It is probably best to get the team to brain storm for several minutes on each affinity. Make sure you get a good number of ideas for each affinity. These initial project ideas should themselves then be affinitised and sorted into individual stand alone projects or clusters of similar themed projects. Do not make any attempt to prioritise at this stage but it is sometimes useful to sort them into:

• Quick hits - simple 'Just-do-its'
• Action plans - ideas or solutions requiring some degree of organisation and coordination
• Product / Service development - these may well eventually get passed on to the responsible parties within the business
• Lean Six Sigma projects - problems with no obvious solution

How do I prioritise the project opportunties according to the Customer feedback?

Prioritisation is probably best achieved by means of a ‘Cause and Effect’ matrix:

In this case the selection criteria will be the customer affinity titles and the importance ratings from the number of items in the affinities. It is usual to complete the correlations by means of scores of 0 (no impact), 1 (some impact), 3 (medium impact), 9 (strong impact).

Project attractiveness scores are calculated by means of the ‘sum-product’ function in Excel where the ‘correlation array’ is multiplied and summed according to the ‘importance array’. This total column is then sorted to complete the prioritisation process.

How do I generate project opportunities from quantitative Customer feedback?

Many surveys contain responses to questions providing quantitative data by the use of a Likert scale. Typical questions might be:

• I was pleased with speed of service
• I was pleased with the quality of service
• I would purchase from you in the future
• I would recommend you to friends, family and colleagues

Allowed responses for Likert scale might be:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Neither agree or disagree
• Agree
• Strongly agree

One simple but effective way to analyse such feedback is to use the ‘Top & Bottom Box’ method. Here you calculate what percentage of customers rated you as ‘Agree’ and ‘Strongly agree’ as compared to what percentage rated you as ‘Strongly disagree’ and ‘Disagree’. Questions with high levels percentages in the bottom box clearly point to areas where the company needs to improve.

 Another method is to allocate a number to each rating (usually 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 respectively for Strongly disagree, Disagree, Neither agree or disagree, Agree and Strongly agree) and then simply calculate the median and range of scores and use these to judge where poor and/or variable feedback exists. 

Such quantitative feedback questions have the advantage of offering hard numbers to gauge the effectiveness of a company’s response to bad feedback, but these questions will need to be supported by means of contextual ones to help the business to focus on key aspects of the product or service which has led to a poor feedback, and these should be analysed as explained above in the ‘qualitative’ feedback section of this article.

I have attempted to lay out some simple but effective ways to ensure that customer feedback is at the heart of our project selection methodology in this article.

I have discussed the use of qualitative and quantitative feedback and any Lean Six Sigma project selection process based on such data is best undertaken with the use of both types of feedback. 

We started with a discussion on ‘who is our customer’ and ended with a way of prioritising and selecting emergent projects ready for launch by the Belts.

The use of customer feedback in the selection of Lean Six Sigma projects is probably one of the best ways of ensuring that a business is using its most talented and enthusiastic recourses (its Lean Six Sigma Belts) on improving customer satisfaction. And when you come to think about it, where else would you want to use such a resource?

Author Name - Mike Titchen (MBB, SigmaPro)

Mike is a highly experienced MBB and has worked in both manufacturing and financial services industries. Mike joined SigmaPro as a Master Black Belt and lead trainer in 2006. His consulting and training experience has involved the development and delivery of training materials for Six Sigma programmes for several high profile clients, and Mike has helped clients deliver improvement savings totaling over 5 Million Pounds.

Before he joined SigmaPro, he has implemented and has been responsible for Six Sigma with Norwich Union, Textron and General Electric. Mike has an MBA and a BA (Arts), and away from work he enjoys golf, tennis, snooker and listening to music.