Blending the Voices of Disparate Customers
August 27th, 2008 by James Grover
House of Quality Folding
If one is using software that doesn’t allow values other than 1’s, 3’s, and/or 9’s to be entered as ratings values, then another process known as “House of Quality Folding” can be used to merge the voices of disparate customers. House of Quality Folding is very similar to using Percentage Translation via an HOQ. The only real difference between the two processes is that the customer is restricted to categorizing their requirements as having “low”, “medium” or “high” levels of importance, corresponding to rating values of 1, 3, or 9 respectively.
Singing in Perfect Harmony
Percentage Translation allows a team to combine the requirements of different customers and to weight those requirements in a manner that reflects not only those customers’ wishes but also the relative importance of those customers to the business. Percentage Translation via a House of Quality allows any changes in business or customer requirements to be automatically propagated to subsequent matrices in the QFD. Additionally, it encourages the analysis that comes from populating other fields in the HOQ, such as the correlation matrix (a.k.a. the “roof”).
House of Quality Folding does not provide as much data as Percentage Translation due to the restriction that customers can only assign 3 different weights to their requirements. Thus, it Percentage Translation via an HOQ is generally the preferred option for combining the voices of distinct customers. However, it House of Quality Folding is frequently considered preferable to Percentage Translation that has to be done in a separate spreadsheet or table due to the tedium of keeping two different sets of data synchronized as business and/or customer requirements change.
Each of the aforementioned processes are very beneficial for helping teams analyze, prioritize, and respond to the distinct voices of different “customer” groups, however. Both are effective at blending the voices of separate business, consumer, and regulatory groups into a single harmonic chorus.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under House of Quality, Advice, Voice of the Customer, Remodeling the HOQ™, Quality Function Deployment, QFD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response.
September 15th, 2008 at 10:29 am
In reviewing the contents of the website, I was trying to find suggested methods/approach for collecting “Demanded Quality” (aka Customer Requirements). I suppose methods include: face-to-face customer visits or perhaps internet surveys. Is anyone able to elaborate on how they have been successful in collecting Customer Requirements from a)direct consumers, and b)from business customers- which can be later used to begin the QFD exercise?
Thank you,
Scot