My modifications preserve the focus of Griffin and Hauser’s hallmark, VOC process.

Griffin and Hauser¹ concentrate on “the tasks of identifying, structuring, and providing priorities for customer needs.”

Modifications and their benefits

1 VOC interviews limited to cold-call, phone interviews with potential customers on their needs for the client’s product concept.

Benefits

• Speedy contact with the customer and their acceptance to start an interview.
• A skilled VOC phone interviewer², in the first 15 sec. of contact, assumes the role of an “Intelligent Pupil’ while putting the customer in the role of the “Professor.”
• Low cost compared to face-to-face interviews.

No travel expenses or last minute cancellation by desired interviewee.

• Easy to maintain a Blind Study

The customer’s responses are unbiased.

They don’t learn the identity of the client.

2 Interviewers are masters of the art of competitive intelligence (CI) elicitation²

• CI elicitation is an open-dialogue way to discreetly gather information. CIA and FBI are practitioners.

Benefits

• • Interviewer gathers valuable, non-public insights on needs from key customers.

Endnotes

1. The Voice of Customer Abbie Griffin, John Hauser, Marketing Science Institute Report No. 92-106 (1972)
2. a.“Elicitation is a technique used to discretely gather information. It is a conversation with a specific purpose: collect information that is not readily available and do so without raising suspicion that specific facts are being sought. It is non-threatening, easy to disguise, and effective”

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) brochure,“Elicitation Techniques”

b. Confidential John Nolan, Harper Business, NY, NY (1999)