Introduction

Any business that wants to align the operations of their business with the needs of their customers will need a CTQ tree. As the business goes through a lot of competition, truly understanding the needs and delivering the best result to the customer becomes very important to sustain them. And this is the tool that is going to help you throughout the process. 

 

1. Identify Critical Customer Needs.

The first and most important step is to find out what your customer needs. After having a basic understanding, you can explore similar needs and other priorities. These are the key needs—the must-have standards—that your clients expect you to meet.

Maybe your customers say they want fast delivery, good product quality, and easy returns. So, those would be the needs you need to focus on. Don’t assume that you know your customer’s needs. Make sure you have a clear understanding of what they value. So if you understand the needs of your customers on a very deep level, you can easily design your product and your services according to the needs of your customers.

 

2. Determine Quality Drivers.

This step consists of finding all the important features and details that should be included to satisfy the needs of customers that were already identified by us. These quality drivers will be the most important factor for our customers to decide whether their needs and expected quality standards are being met or not. 

 

How Do You Identify Quality Drivers?

Review customers needs

You can start by looking at the needs of your customers that you gathered before. You will get a broad range of ideas regarding quality drivers from this list. These are the basic elements that you have to keep in mind before coming up with any quality drivers. 

 

Ask Questions

Interact with your customers or talk to your team members, who interact with a lot of customers of your product or service daily. During these interactions, you can ask some insightful questions that will make the identification of quality drivers easy for you. 

 

Use Tools

You can use tools like the KANO model that will have a huge impact on customer satisfaction. This model will help you by defining product features and service attributes and how they affect customer satisfaction and their perception. 

 

3. Define Performance Requirements.

Now that you have identified the customer’s needs and quality drivers, it is important to define performance requirements. In this step, you have to define those needs and drivers into measurable and time-specific standards that your business must meet to satisfy customers.

These performance requirements act as a standard that will be compared with each of those quality drivers to ensure how successful our business is at satisfying our customers.

How Do I Define Performance Requirements?

Review quality drivers.

Go through each of the quality drivers and try to find measurable performance metrics that can improve customer satisfaction. The requirements for your performance should be based on previously identified quality drivers.

 

Set measurable standards.

Make sure that every standard you want to include is measurable in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Quantitative standards are measured in numeric values or ratings. And qualitative standards are based on the quality of your product or service.

 

Establish upper and lower limits.

Make sure you define both upper and lower limits to the performance requirement. This ensures that you do not spend excess costs or resources unnecessarily. 

 

4. Construct The CTQ Tree.

Here comes the final step of this process. You have to convert the needs of your customers into actionable quality requirements. Create a visual representation of the customer’s needs and make sure everyone in your organization understands the essential requirements to meet the customer’s needs and quality expectations.

You can construct a CTQ tree in a hierarchical structure where you place customers’s needs on top, then quality drivers, and then performance requirements. This structure is easy to understand, and it clearly defines the relationship of each element with the other. 

Professional diagramming software is recommended for menial and clean diagrams; you can also use pen and paper for a quick sketch.

 

Review CTQ Tree with Customers

This is an important step. After everything you have done, you have to validate it with feedback from your customers and stakeholders to make sure that the CTQ tree aligns with the vision of your company and the needs of your customers. After reviewing, you can make some adjustments and improve the CTQ tree to make it even better. 

 

Conclusion

The CTQ tree plays a very crucial role in understanding your customers and their expectations of your product or service. It is a very valuable Six Sigma tool that can really help you build loyal customers. By following the four steps mentioned above, businesses can tweak their processes a little and achieve maximum customer satisfaction.