Five Whys

If you are interested in the subject of customer churn and their antecedents’ product failure or service failure, you probably heard something of the Five Why’s. 
 
Companies have been using the Five Why’s as a tool to help them get back to the root causes of product or service failure for as long as those have been happening. It is an informal drill-down technique...
If you are interested in the subject of customer churn and their antecedents’ product failure or service failure, you probably heard something of the Five Why’s. 
 
Companies have been using the Five Why’s as a tool to help them get back to the root causes of product or service failure for as long as those have been happening. It is an informal drill-down technique of asking questions to force you to get back to why things went wrong. There is a great example in an HBR article by titled Learning from Customer Defections by Frederick F. Reichheld
 
Why did the product get returned as defective?
 
The connector came loose.
Why did the connector come loose?
The plug was out of tolerance.
Why was the plug manufactured out of tolerance?
The intermediate stamping machine failed.
Why did the stamping machine fail?
Routine maintenance wasn’t done on schedule.
Why?
 Honesty and access to facts are required to make the process work. Also required is a place to start. How do you know what the major product service failure is? No doubt, there are some sources of data from internal process controls or customer complaints. These are good. However, they may lead you in the wrong direction, since the product or service failures that you want to study first are the ones that create customer churn the most.
 
So, ask the customers. Questions such as:
 
                Did our service providers perform the work better than you expected?
               
                Did the widget you bought from us perform better than you expected?
 
                Why Not? or What especially did you like?
 
                Are you likely to be a customer next year?
 
                Why? Not or Why?
 
The answers to these questions along with others are the first places you can ask ‘Why’. The customer questioning probably needs to be done by third parties to make sure that your own employees are not getting partial answers or influencing the results. Additionally, a good third party can record the customers’ comments to the ‘Why questions’ so that you can play them for the people doing the analysis. There is something very compelling about the voice of the customer when it truly reflects their angst and disappointment and is not just a written verbatim comment.
 
The other features that a third party can bring include:
           
1-      Building sampling plans to make sure these important results are statistically    reliable and accurately reflect the mix of your clients.
2-      Providing reports about the results and providing the all important list of key drivers of being a customer next year
3-      Quick turnaround
4-      Probably a lower cost than if you did it yourself
 
Have you asked ‘Why’ five times lately?
 
For more about this technique try:
 
http://www.isixsigma.com/library/:content/c020610a.asp
 
 
 
 
               
 

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