Employing the Kano Model to Understand the Voice of the Customer

Attracting and retaining customers takes considerable, ongoing effort by suppliers. Suppliers must continuously strive to understand their customer’s ever-changing needs and expectations. The Kano model of attractive quality enables suppliers to prioritize their product or service development efforts based on customer perceptions. The Kano model distinguishes the attributes related to customer quality and provides a powerful method for visualizing these attributes. The Kano model is a quality methodology that enables comprehensive insight into customer needs through data visualization by identifying the features/attributes of a service that significantly impact their satisfaction. The Kano model has gained popularity in many industries, including manufacturing, service, and healthcare, due to its effectiveness in understanding customer expectations. In particular, the Kano model allows suppliers to identify, classify, and prioritize complex customer needs and necessary quality improvements. For organizations to be successful, they must understand their customers’ expectations. The Kano model helps suppliers identify complex customer needs, categorize them based on their impact on satisfaction, and prioritize them based on their strength values (category and total) that indicate an important customer perspective.
The Kano model offers a theoretical and operative methodology for understanding customer needs and perceptions by visually representing the relationship between the functional performance of quality attributes and the degree of satisfaction achieved. The Kano model also aids in determining product or service development and improvement priorities based on the customers’ quality perception and is valuable in understanding a product or service life cycle. Due to the increased traceability and clear visualization of the voice of the customer, numerous industries are increasingly adopting the Kano model. The Kano model can be used to identify and classify the quality attributes of a product or service as one of the five categories of perceived quality, which include must-be, attractive, one-dimensional, reverse, and indifferent categories.
Unfortunately, most organizations incorrectly use the Kano model. This presentation will provide detailed instructions on properly setting up a Kano model questionnaire and analyzing the responses. In addition, the presentation will discuss how to calculate the category and total strength. To further illustrate the entire Kano model process, a case study will be presented that walks through how to use the Kano model. The case study will show how to identify survey objectives, draft the survey, identify target respondents, and select the method for collecting responses.