Let’s Build A House Of Quality. Part I. Capturing the Voice Of the Customer

By Issa Bass


Customers’ “needs” and “wants” are two distinct things, and the ways in which they react when their “needs” or “wants” are satisfied or unsatisfied are not the same. The needs themselves are not appreciated at the same level, some needs are critical in a product, some are necessary but not as critical and some are still neither necessary nor critical but they do make customers feel delighted.

When a company chooses how to produce and sell its products, it needs to be able to measure what features of the product result in satisfying the expressed and implicit needs of the customers’.
Adding a multitude of features to a product or a service does not necessarily increase its appeal. Being able to know with accuracy what critical few features are demanded and how the customers react to their presence or non presence can help improve quality at a lower cost.

The Kano Analysis (named after Dr Noriaki Kano who invented it) is a tool that helps determine what characteristics a producer might want to include to the product or service to increase customer satisfaction. The Kano model breaks down a product’s features according to how they can meet customers’ expectations, some of which are explicit and some latent.

Kano divides the products’ features in three:

·         “The threshold (basic) features” which define the product; without them, the product is useless, these features are fundamental to the product. When you buy a cellular phone, you expect to hear the person on the other end of the line and you expect that person to hear you. If you cannot find that feature on the phone, you will not buy it.
But the sheer presence of the basic features does lead to customer glee.

·         “The performance features” which may not be as important as the threshold features but can increase the customers’ satisfactions. The clarity of reception of a cellular phone can be put in that category.

·         “The delighter features”, which the customers may not expect to find on the product but which presence are exiting to them.

The ways in which the customers react to the presence or absence of these attributes on a product or service are usually summarized in the following Kano diagram.

 The reasoning behind the Kano Analysis seems so far very commonsensical, but since most competing products provide the same basic needs, the objective of the producer should be the identification and the classification of the essential attributes in order to satisfy his customers while not adding superfluous features that might end up being costly.

A producer can use surveys, brainstorming sessions and focus groups to assess the customers’ response to the different features of a product or a service. 
For a survey, the questionnaire must address all the possible features that can be found on a product because the objective is to eliminate the unnecessary attributes and retain the critical few.
The objective of the producer is not just to add the “delighter attributes” to a product but also to put them at an appropriate, a distinguishable part of the product or service. The objective is to rouse a “wow!!!!!!" effect.

 
About the author
Issa Bass is the managing editor of SixSigmaFirst. He can be reached at issa@sixsigmafirst.com

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