Customer-Focused Organizations
What to know
A customer-focused organization defines quality as conformance to customer requirements - including internal customers who receive work from upstream processes.
Voice of the customer (VOC) comes from interviews, focus groups, surveys, complaint and warranty data, social listening, and observation. VOC must be translated into measurable critical-to-quality (CTQ) characteristics, typically through QFD. Customers describe solutions ('make it lighter'); your job is to recover the underlying need.
The Kano model classifies requirements as must-be (absence outrages, presence goes unnoticed), performance (more is better, linear), and attractive or delighter (unexpected; absence is not penalized). Delighters decay into performance and eventually must-be requirements over time.
Know the satisfaction–loyalty distinction: satisfied customers still defect; loyalty shows in retention, share of spend, and referral. Complaint handling should be fast, fair, and fed back into root-cause correction - a complaint resolved well can create more loyalty than no problem at all. Common metrics: overall satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (percentage of 9–10 promoters minus 0–6 detractors), ACSI, and SERVQUAL's five dimensions - reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, tangibles - with reliability usually weighted highest.
Traps: treating NPS as a satisfaction percentage (it is a difference of percentages, ranging −100 to +100); forgetting internal customers; confusing a corrective action with an apology.
Worked example
Of 500 respondents, 240 score 9–10, 160 score 7–8, and 100 score 0–6. NPS = 48% − 20% = +28, not 48%.