Customer Needs and Customer Satisfaction

Customer needs and customer satisfaction can be considered as something that is at the centre of every successful business. Every business needs a reason for their customers to buy from them and not their competitors. This is called a Unique Sales Proposition (USP). Your USP can be identified by completing the phrase "Customers will buy from me because my business is the only...". Your USP can change as your business or your market changes, and you can have different USPs for different types of customer. Any USPs is important because they are driven by what the customer looks for when making a buying decision. It’s very important to review our USP as well as the competitor’s USP to win the market

INTEGRATING KANSEI ENGINEERING AND CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT TO IMPROVE SERVICE QUALITY: A CASE STUDY AT SHOPPING MALL IN SURABAYA

With respect to customer dynamics in experiencing products and services, nowadays, customers tend to highly demand hedonism, pleasure and individuality rather than functionality and usability. In other words, they look for a service that offers more values (both physically and emotionally) from its function. Apart from that, it is a must for a company to strive for achieving customer loyalty. Thus, this study proposes an integrative framework of Kansei Engineering (KE) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in services. It aims to explore the customer emotional needs (Kansei in Japanese) experienced and encountered in services. As emphasized in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) concept, understanding the customer emotional needs is one of successful keys for CRM implementation. In order to analyze the applicability of the proposed framework, a case study taken at a brand new elegant shopping mall in Surabaya that involved 100 customers was conducted. Some significant Kansei words as the representatives of customer emotional needs were obtained, such as elegant, believe, cool, wide and curious. These Kansei words have significant correlation with several service attributes, such as: “service given without social status”, “service accuracy”, “responsive employees”, “convenient parking lots”, “attractive events”, and “neat and attractive employees”. Some improvement innitiatives were proposed, including to accelerate the parking lots construction, and to provide a clear directions to the mall access. Theoretically, this study contributes to academic literatures on the relationship between CRM and KE providing in a unified integrated framework. Practically, this research provides a guidance to service managers in collecting and capturing the emotional needs of customers, and investigating what service attributes that are significantly sensitive to the customer emotions. It is, then, to be used as a prioritization tool for continuous improvement or maintenance on service attributes

Understanding customer satisfaction based on the way they evaluate service delivery

With the development of society, the service industry has become the pillar of the world economy. People's demand for service products is getting higher and higher because people are becoming increasing lazy. Through this research, an immigration organisation showed most customers are not satisfied with the price of service, so the aim of the research is to understand customer satisfaction through their interaction with the service provider. This paper used qualitative method and unstructured interviews. Six interviewees obtained through email were used. The results showed that most customers are satisfied with member engagement in service delivery and credibility of the business, and that the organisation should improve staff response to customers’ questions. There are some recommendations. Firstly, that the company needs to have a strategy for training staff to improve customer satisfaction. Secondly, the organisation needs to think about how they can improve credibility because it is essential to customer satisfaction. Finally, the company needs to improve communication quality to reduce customer waiting time by increasing staff numbers for customer satisfaction

Customer related facilities management processes: understanding the needs of the customer

In the past, organisations could concentrate on their internal capabilities, emphasising product performance and technology innovation. Organisations that did not understand their customers’ needs eventually found that competitors could make inroads by offering products or services better aligned to their customers’ preferences. Many Facilities Management organisations today have a mission focused on the customer, and how the organisation is performing its customers’ perspective has become a priority for the organisational management. How the FM organisation is performing through the eyes of its customers has therefore become a priority issue for facilities managers. This captures the ability of the organisation to provide quality goods and services, the effectiveness of their delivery, and overall customer service and satisfaction. It places importance on the organisation’s ability to achieve its vision, and how it wants to be seen by its customers. This paper will discuss some of the important FM customer related processes and mechanisms associated with its measurement identified through a series of case studies carried out as part of a major research stud

The application framework of Kansei Engineering to enhance Customer Relationship Management in services

In order to fit what a customer needs and wants, a product or a service should be qualified. By incorporating Ergonomics/Human Factors and affect, quality of products and services should promote happiness and health to the users. Improved quality and long-lasting products/services make customers happy (Nagamachi & Lokman, 2011). According to Tribus (1990), quality is defined as a condition when customers have a love affair and emotional bondage with particular products and services. It implies that the main concern of qualified products and services is customer emotional experience. This study aims to explore the customer emotional needs (Kansei in Japanese) experienced and encountered in services. As emphasized in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), understanding the customer emotional needs is one succesful key for CRM implementation. Kansei Engineering (KE) methodology that has been widely used for modeling the emotional needs in product design is proposed to support the CRM improvement. Hence, this study has two objectives. The first is to develop an integrative application framework of the contribution of KE to CRM, while the second is to provide an illustrative example of how to apply KE-CRM into service industry. This study is expected to contribute to the theoretical academic literatures on Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing management, Ergonomics/Human Factors and Kansei by proposing an application framework and methodology of integrated KE-CRM. In addition, practical contributions will be presented by providing a guidance to service managers in collecting and capturing the emotional needs of customers, using the rich-channel of information for collecting information, and investigating what service attributes that are significantly sensitive to the customer emotions. It is, then, to be used as a prioritization tool for continuous improvement or maintenance on service attributes

Integrating Kansei Engineering into Kano and SERVQUAL Model to Determine the Priorities of Service Improvement (Case Study: Café Agape at Ruteng, East Nusa Tenggara – Indonesia)

In order to improve service quality, a research framework of integrating Kansei Engineering into Kano and SERV-QUAL was deployed in Café Agape. SERVQUAL model is used to identify whether the provided service has been fulfill customer needs; whether customers were satisfied and what service attributes that have negative customer satisfaction indexes. Kano model can classify the service attributes into groups, i.e., attractive, one dimensional, must be or even indifferent; the classification can be used to determine the priorities. Kansei Engineering takes the customer emotion into account and tries to identify customer needs (feelings) more specific. The integration is aimed to determine the improvement priorities. A survey of 100 customers using 21 service attributes and 10 Kansei words resulted on 15 attributes that have negative customer satisfaction score. However, only 9 attributes will be prioritized for improvement because they are Attractive (A) and One dimensional (O) attributes due to the result of Kano classification. The analysis of Kansei Engineering showed that “convenience” was the customers’ most important emotion when they receive services at Café Agape. Meanwhile, there are 6 of 10 Kansei word (customer emotional needs) significantly different between two groups of Café Agape’s customers; foreign/overseas customers felt happier, more relieved, friendly, welcome and attractive but less sedate/quiet than local/domestic ones when they consume services at Café Agape

Identifying smart design attributes for Industry 4.0 customization using a clustering Genetic Algorithm

Industry 4.0 aims at achieving mass customization at a mass production cost. A key component to realizing this is accurate prediction of customer needs and wants, which is however a challenging issue due to the lack of smart analytics tools. This paper investigates this issue in depth and then develops a predictive analytic framework for integrating cloud computing, big data analysis, business informatics, communication technologies, and digital industrial production systems. Computational intelligence in the form of a cluster k-means approach is used to manage relevant big data for feeding potential customer needs and wants to smart designs for targeted productivity and customized mass production. The identification of patterns from big data is achieved with cluster k-means and with the selection of optimal attributes using genetic algorithms. A car customization case study shows how it may be applied and where to assign new clusters with growing knowledge of customer needs and wants. This approach offer a number of features suitable to smart design in realizing Industry 4.0

Applying Kansei Engineering, the Kano model and QFD to services

This paper aims to present an integrative framework of Kansei Engineering (KE), the Kano model and quality function deployment (QFD) applied to services. An empirical study involving Indonesian and Singaporean tourists was conducted to showcase the framework’s applicability. The study utilises a sample of 100 Indonesian and 125 Singaporean tourists who stayed in luxury hotels and covers only services in luxury hotels. Interviews and face-to-face questionnaire surveys were carried out. Using stepwise linear regression analysis, this research models the effect of perceived hotel service performance on customer emotional needs (Kansei). House of quality (HOQ) is then used to formulate managerial strategies. We present the fruitfulness of integrating the Kano model, KE and QFD. Perceived attractive qualities have a direct significant impact on Kansei response. There is no analysis of the impact of cultural differences on Kansei. We provide insight on which service attributes deserve more attention with regard to their significant impact on customer emotions. It may guide service managers to provide and implement improvement strategies in satisfying customer emotional needs. The study proposes a unique methodology of integrative three concepts commonly used in manufacturing and service quality research to measure and model customer emotional needs

Thinking strategically about customers: a view from the health and fitness industry

Customer retention is considered to be one of the key areas for most service providers in the UK Health and Fitness Industry. Much of the existing research and activity concerning customer retention is considered at a tactical, operational level with little emphasis being placed on the strategic considerations that an organisation needs to consider in order to move toward a customer-centred philosophy. This paper suggests that customer retention levels can be improved by thinking more strategically about the organisational purpose, its resources and customers

The integrative framework of Kansei Engineering and SERVQUAL incorporating CRM applied to services: A case study on hotel services in Surabaya

Understanding customer needs better is a key for the success of customer relationship management (CRM). It may cov-er insight into customer decision-making and information about customers. Essentially, CRM is to understand customer needs so that it may improve a company’s long-term profitability. Lack of customer focus is quite critical to the success of CRM implementation. Specifically, a mechanism for maintaining and developing customer loyalty is a key potential to be taken into account. In short, understanding of customer needs (both functional and emotional) is needed. More importantly, understanding customer emotional needs is vital for predicting and influencing customer purchasing be-havior. Customers today concern themselves more on satisfying their emotions and feelings more on satisfying their emotions than merely their cognition. Some commonly used service quality tools such as quality function deployment (QFD) and SERVQUAL have been applied extensively to services. Many service researchers have successfully used SERVQUAL and other similar scales to measure and improve service quality in a variety of industries. But none have been able to incorporate customers’ emotional needs. Some attention has been given to investigate this. But thus far, there is no formal methodology that can account for customer’s feelings and emotions taking into account CRM in ser-vice design. To fill this niche, this study proposes an integrative framework of Kansei Engineering (KE) and SERVQUAL applied to services. This study uses data from tourists who stayed in hotels in Surabaya to demonstrate the integrative model framework and show how the customer emotional needs can be designed into its hotel services sys-tem