Am I missing something? In the Organizational Profile, the Baldrige Criteria ask for the key requirements and expectations for your products, services, programs, offerings, etc. I was ready to link that question to the question about how you determine those requirements but it doesn’t exist. I’m pretty sure it used to.

Instead, Category 3 asks several questions about specific areas where you need to understand customer (patient, student, etc.) requirements, such as with product, service, and program offerings; support; customer life cycles; transactions; and complaint management. The Criteria also ask about customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

The answers to these questions come from your customers. Here are nine ways Baldrige Award recipients and other high-performing organizations listen to the Voice of the Customer:

1. Interview them. Sit down with current, former, and potential customers and ask about their requirements and expectations.
2. Survey them. Ask customers what is most important to them in addition to how satisfied they are.
3. Do focus groups. Pull together representatives of a specific customer segment to discuss their needs.
4. Get feedback on recent transactions. This has become an effective step in healthcare with the use of post-discharge phone calls.
5. Collect information from your sales and service people. Be specific about seeking information that will help identify and affirm customer requirements and expectations.
6. Ask for complaints, comments, and suggestions. Communicate your desire for information and make it easy for customers to speak their piece.
7. Form customer advisory groups. Choose eight to ten key customers to meet semiannually to discuss your strategies, potential products or services, industry trends—and their requirements.
8. Involve customers in your processes. Have them participate in strategic planning, product/service design, and process improvement. Invite key customers to speak to senior leaders and department heads.
9. Observe customers using your products, services, and programs. This seems to be the best way to discover their unarticulated needs.

The final step is to close the loop on these information-gathering approaches by designing and refining processes to collect, analyze, validate, and use the information gathered from these listening posts to answer the questions in Category 3.

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