Q) What is the house of quality?

How important is the voice of

the customer in quality management?
A) The house of quality, a part of QFD (Quality Function Deployment), identifies and classifies
customer desires, identifies the importance of those desires, identifies engineering
characteristics that may be relevant to those desires, correlates the two, allows for verification
of those correlations, and then assigns objectives and priorities for the system requirements.

This process can be applied at any system composition level (e.g. system, subsystem, or
component) in the design of a product, and can allow for the assessment of different
abstractions of a system. The House of Quality appeared in 1972 in the design of an oil tanker
by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

The output of the house of quality is generally a matrix with customer desires on one dimension
and correlated nonfunctional requirements on the other dimension.

The cells of the matrix table are filled with the weights assigned to the stakeholder
characteristics and those characteristics are affected by the system parameters across the top of
the matrix.

At the bottom of the matrix, the column is summed, which allows for the system characteristics
to be weighted according to the stakeholder characteristics.

System parameters not correlated to stakeholder characteristics may be unnecessary to the

system design and are identified by empty matrix columns, while stakeholder characteristics
(identified by empty rows) not correlated to system parameters indicate "characteristics not
addressed by the design parameters". System parameters and stakeholder characteristics with
weak correlations potentially indicate missing information, while matrices with "too many
correlations" indicate that the stakeholder needs may need to be redefined.

How important is the voice of the customer in quality

management?
Voice of the Customer is defined as the collection and analysis of customer feedback so that
customers’ wants, needs, and expectations (the “customer experience”) can be qualitatively and
quantitatively assessed.

A Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is a group of activities designed to facilitate the
collection and analysis of customer feedback, with a specific focus on identifying opportunities
to improve the customer experience.

The voice of the Customer is important because it provides a methodology for monitoring and
improving your customer experience.

It costs five to twenty-five times as much to acquire a new customer as to retain an existing one.
Improvements in your customer experience -> higher retention.

50% of buyers are happy to share an unsolicited recommendation.

Prospects find a customer testimonial to be 82% more credible than any marketing material a
company can produce.

· Generate a global measure of sentiment toward your brand

· Measure sentiment change (hopefully improvement!) over time

· Identify areas where customers are most satisfied with your product

· Identify areas where customers are least satisfied with your product

· Understand how customers value your product

· Isolate and prioritize feature requests

Top 7 Voice of the Customer benefits:

· Faster improvements in your customer experience

· Proactive reputation management

· Innovate faster than your competition

· Create brand advocates and superfans

· Improved retention

· Increased ROI on marketing

· Vastly better employee retention