Customer-Oriented Product Development: Establish a Feedback System
From the Designer of the Improvement Project
Tadahiko Matsui
Group Leader, Planning Group, QA & Environmental Compliance
Dept.,
Business Administration Div., Olympus Imaging Corp.
We continuously check customers' responses to product improvement. We not only reflect improvements based on customer comments in our products and services, we also establish and promote a customer-oriented corporate culture and mechanisms throughout the organization, including the development and marketing sections.
From a Collector of Customers' Voices
Seiichi Wakamatsu
Group Leader, Planning Administration Group, Support & Service
Dept.,
Global Sales & Marketing Div., Olympus Imaging Corp
We cannot be critics who analyze customers' requests. Instead, we must speak for them and suggest better products or services. Can we make the best suggestion or find the right answers for them? We have to constantly ask ourselves. To this end it is important to understand what customers feel from the point of view
Naturally, we cannot discuss all 20,000 comments at a VOC meeting. In the Support Service Division these comments are analyzed regularly to adopt countermeasures through discussions with related sections. After that, the comments to be shared at management level are selected and later submitted to the monthly VOC meeting.
"Narrowing down the list is the key. If there are too many, most of them will be left unresolved. We choose problems that seem urgent, even if the number of inquiries is few," says Wakamatsu.
The Support Service Division, which has direct contact with customers, knows what we should do.
"Customers' comments can be demanding for people in charge of planning and development, but it leads to awareness-raising. It depends on customers' evaluations whether developed products are well accepted in the market," says Tadahiko Matsui, Environmental Quality Assurance Dept., Business Administration Div., Olympus Imaging Corp.
In other words, VOC meetings are used to improve our products based on customers' needs, not on our needs. Matsui adds, "We aim to build a total feedback system," including business process, rather than simply an improvement in products.
Examples include backlight luminance adjustment in liquid crystal monitors, firmware updates for existing model cameras that require longer startup times with the introduction of higher capacity storage media and enhancement of image editing software where users faced difficulties in finding the images that they wanted. Marketing methods of seasonal products such as waterproof protectors and descriptions in catalogues were also changed.
Of course there are still many challenges to be met. What shall we do when contradictory needs arise in the future? When this project is launched in Europe and the United States, how do we go about communicating customers' comments in various languages? These are challenging tasks for us in establishing a customer-oriented product development system
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