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A validation Study of House of Quality key performance indicators
Customer Needs (WHAT’S)
As mentioned before, QFD starts with the customer. The first step in creating a House of Quality is to
identity the needs of the customers for the product or service, collect and when necessary organize
these needs, and reveal the relative importance perceived by the customers. Usually when an
organization is using the HOQ, the focus is on the ultimate customers. Also in this research for the
Unie, the focus will be on the ultimate customers who are in this case the members of the online
labour union.
After identifying the target group of customers, the needs of the customers for the product or service
have to be determined. A customer need is a description, in the customer’s own words, of the benfits
that have to be fullfilled by the product or service (Griffin and Hauser 1993).
Kano et al. (1984) developed a model which defines three types of customer needs (Figure - 6). In
this model attributes of a product or service are categorized on how well they are able to satisfy the
needs of the customers. The following categories of customer needs are defined:
- Basic needs, also known as must-be needs; customers become dissatisfied when performance of the
product attribute is low and satisfaction will not rise above neutral even with a high performance of
product or service attribute. These needs reflect to features wich must exist before a potential
customer will consider a product or service. The performance or one-dimensional needs allow a
direct comparisson between competing products and are therefore more quantifiable. Customer
satisfaction is a linear function of the performance of the product attribute; higher attibute
performance will lead to higher customer satisfaction. The third category are the exitement or
attractive needs also called delighters. Inclusion of these features delight the customer, even if they
did not ask for such features. Therefore customer satisfaction increases super-linearly when
increasing the product of service attribute performance. Important to notice is that there will be no
decrease in customer satisfaction when there is a decrease in attribute performance. These are the
features that give a feeling of “wow” to the customers and therefore we can conclude that these
features are most suitable for differentiation.
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