Int. J. Management in Education, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2008 195 Copyright © 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Outlining the voices of customers in technical education Roma Mitra Debnath* IGSM, Knowledge Park II Greater Noida, 201 306, India E-mail: roma.mitra@gmail.com E-mail: mitra_roma@rediffmail.com *Corresponding author Ravi Shankar School of Management Asian Institute of Technology P.O. Box 4, Klong Luang Pathumthani, 12120, Thailand E-mail: rshankar@ait.ac.th E-mail: r.s@rediffmail.com Surender Kumar Department of Production Engineering Birla Institute of Technology Mesra Ranchi 835215, India E-mail: rch_bitprod@sancharnet.in Abstract: Understanding customer requirements have become an indispensable tool to remain competitive in the world nowadays. This holds true in educational institutes, too. The quality of the academic programme largely depends on the curriculum design of the various courses, because the success of any technical programme is largely affected by the curriculum of the courses. This paper demonstrates how the technical institutes can apply Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to translate the Voices of Customers (VOCs) into operations to improve their curriculum. To improve the curriculum, the students’ expectations of the curriculum and faculty performance are being captured, as the course curricula and the performance of the faculty are two crucial parameters interacting to produce quality education. Keywords: Quality Function Deployment; QFD; Voices of Customers; VOCs; curriculum development; management in education; technical education; India. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Debnath, R.M., Shankar, R. and Kumar, S. (2008) ‘Outlining the voices of customers in technical education’, Int. J. Management in Education, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp.195–221.