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VOC & CTQ Analysis 2013-10-11 page 1 of 2
Voice of the Customer (VOC) and Critical-to-Quality (CTQ)
Voice of Customer (VOC)
An important element of Six Sigma is understanding your customer. This is called VOC or Voice of
Customer. By doing this, it allows you to find all of the necessary information that is relevant between
your product/process and the customer, better known as CTQ’s (Critical to Quality). The CTQ’s are
the customer requirements for satisfaction with your product or service.
There are a number of reasons for starting with the customer when working on process improvement:
• It ensures that the problem and goal are defined in terms that truly relate to customer
requirements.
• It avoids cost and time cutting solutions that actually hurt service or relations with
customers.
• It provides insight into possible output measures of the process.
• It helps to create a climate of positive change; sometimes just listening to customer
feedback is a huge leap in customer satisfaction – aka Hawthorne Effect.
• It enables you to translate the often vague customer comments into measurable
statements called Critical to Quality (CTQ) metrics.
How to Collect VOC
1. Brainstorm a list of stakeholders; they could be customers, suppliers, process owners,
regulators, sponsors, groups that are somehow affected, groups that somehow affect the
process.
2. Prioritize the results into three categories; “A” category for those groups that benefit most ore
are affected the most negatively from the process, “B” category, and “C” category for those
groups that are affected the least.
3. As a team, first hypothesize what you think the VOC is for each customer group and person
involved in the process.
4. From your hypothesis, build interview questions. See separate templates and online resources
for possible non-leading questions.
5. Go out and ask individual customers and customer groups, as well as track what they show they
want when they vote with their wallets or feet.
6. Interview key internal process owners to understand each of their perspectives.
7. After data has been collected, sort through responses and de-duplicate.
8. Optionally, categorize responses by performing some sort of affinity diagramming or clustering
activity.
9. Identify solutions that customers have stated and place this information in a separate “Possible
Solutions” document that the team will explore later in the Improve phase.