Is your business strategy aligned to your Customer needs?

To stay competitive and achieve potential growth plans, every business needs to align its strategies with customer needs and demands. However, customer needs keep changing due to a combination of factors. So, how does a company analyze customer needs? What delights customers and what are their basic needs?

Professor Noriaki Kano developed a model which helps companies analyze and address customer needs.

The Kano model addresses three types of customer requirements:

• Satisfying basic needs: allows a company to get into the market
• Satisfying performance needs: allows a company to sustain and stay competitive
• Satisfying excitement needs: allows a company to excel and be world class

Kano model can be used for determining business strategies, competitive analysis, project selection or new product development initiatives. It is a structured process to identify and record the voice of the customer (VOC), translate VOC into critical to quality characteristics and formulate action plan and business strategies to meet customer needs.

The entire process consists of three important steps:

Step 1: Collect voice of customer by means of a questionnaire.

Step 2: Evaluate each customer requirement based on the response

Step 3: Identify the category for each product attribute. Frequency of answers based on all responses is the easiest way to evaluate and identify categories for product attributes

There are 6 categories of product attributes based on the Kano model:

Given below is a step by step guide to collect and evaluate customer responses:

Click here for more details on using the Kano Model.

Download a FREE Kano analysis evaluation tool to easily categorize feedback from customer surveys.