Selling a service is selling the intangible. You know, as a consumer, if you are getting great service from a business. You can feel it, but sometimes it’s hard to actually define. Many times, listening to a demand, a complaint, or a request is all that’s needed to provide great service. In product management circles, Voice of the Customer (VoC) is one of the most important drivers in product development. If we LISTEN really well, the solution has already been provided for us. If a customer says, “I wish you had a widget that would do this.” Or “I need a product to do this for me”. When you hear those statements, LISTEN, and take good notes.
Ascertaining VoC can be a challenge for many companies. How can you systemically listen to thousands of “I wish” or “I need” statements and boil it down to a working product development list? At Kele we actually utilize a very modern marketing department to help cultivate customer responses and needs. Using digital media and short surveys gives the product management team at Kele a gateway to thousands of customer voices and opinions. We sort through them quickly and this VoC gives us solutions to provide better products and better services to you the consumer. Of course it takes your participation in the surveys and you, our customer base, have been great about providing your preferences.
One example, is the Kele Water Detector (WD) family expansion project that is launching at the 2016 AHR Expo in Orlando. Kele has provided a legacy water detector device for over 20 years, and continues to serve a wide range of customers. We started to get “I Wish” responses from WD users like this:
I really like your WD product but I WISH you had a poly material (plastic) enclosure option.
I WISH it had a cable option that could bend around corners in the long sensor run.
We literally sorted through hundreds of survey responses. This form of VoC (your responses) helped shape the design requirements for the next generation of Kele water detectors. Our offering has expanded significantly. We also understood through VoC that our legacy WD product is a great product, and is still required by the industry. So many times, product launches involve a planned obsolescence of existing part numbers. In this case customers spoke, no obsolescence is planned, only expansion of a strong product legacy. So thank you for the feedback, we will continue to provide great customer service, and LISTEN.
