✓ TQM implementation begins with identifying the voice of the customers. That is, to determine what exactly the customer desires from a product or a service.

✓ Since customer needs keep changing, the process of identifying customer needs becomes very difficult and more challenging.

✓ Some of the most common ways to collect customer needs include:

1. Customer surveys, focus groups, and market research programs and studies
2. Routine communications, such as sales and service calls and reports, management reviews, house publications
3. Tracking customer complaints, incident reports, letters, and telephone contacts
4. Customer meetings
5. User conferences for the end user
6. Information on competitor’s products
7. Personal visits to customer locations
8. Personal experience dealing with the customer and the product
9. Employees with special knowledge of the customer
10. Government or independent laboratory data
11. Simulated-use experiments and planning processes that involve the customer