While many believe that customer VoC in a new product development process is a specific event that occurs as part of the business case or marketing analysis, the promise and impact of VoC in a new product's development can be so much more. Many organizations use a stage-gate or similar process for their new developments as a way to provide structure to the new development process. Regardless of which stage of predevelopment you are in—Ideation, Concept, or the Detailed assessment—Customer VoC plays a pivotal role in shaping your product deliverables. If you are in the Development stage of your project, Customer VoC provides the input to make the intelligent choices and tradeoffs that inevitably occur during a development. If you are in the test or the Sales stage, VoC helps you ensure that your assumptions were correct and provides the foundation to articulate the market value to the customer segments. If you are in the post-mortem stage, VoC is critical to evaluate how well you've met the needs of the market and also share your lessons learned with the rest of the organization.

Hopefully you now have a better appreciation of not only how powerful VoC can be in new product development, but how to use it in every stage of the NPD. This helps to ensure that your product is always in tune with the needs of your customer and marketplace, and will ultimately lead to your product success.

In Chapter 4, Gathering the Customer Needs for Your Product, we will start to discuss some of the tools available to us to begin to gather customer VoC, but before we do that, it is worthwhile to discuss some of the other marketing tools and techniques that have a close relationship with VoC and can help to augment a successful VoC initiative in the next chapter, Chapter 3, Laying the Groundwork.