Comwerks Interactive

Using the KANO Model to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Posted by Gul Khan in Measurement on September 4th, 2008

Handling customer requirements for web projects can be a very daunting task. How do we break down your customer needs into a meaningful implementation roadmap? What are the basic features and functions that we must have? What are the “wow” factors? On top of that, how do we reconcile customer needs with business requirements?

I’ve been using the KANO model for some time now with great effect for several of our web development projects. So far, it has worked better than all expectations. Basically, it helps us to break down the customer requirements (derived by conducting various types user research) into the Basic, Performance and “Wow” components and allows us to adopt a tactical approach to website re-design roadmaps. To those who are familiar with the KANO model will immediately understand what I’m driving at. To the rest who are not familiar with this model, here’s a quick explanation:

The KANO model essentially breaks features into three separate categories:

• The “must have” features (i.e. the basic requirements)
• The “performance” features
• And lastly, the “excitement” or “wow” features

How do these three different types of features affect customer satisfaction?

• Basic: Customers get pretty annoyed when this type of feature is missing but they are neutral when it is available. For example, a hotel room with no toilet paper.
• Performance: Customer satisfaction increases as this type of feature is better implemented; example the fuel efficiency of a car.
• Excitement or Wow features: Customers won’t be too disappointed if these are missing but having these features can result in great customer satisfaction and it can differentiate you from your competitors.

If you want to learn more, then c2c Solutions have a great 8-Minute KANO Model Tutorial. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about this model.

How can I identify these requirements for my own website?

This is the tricky part. Very likely you will find that when you do your usual user research studies (surveys, focus groups, observation studies, etc etc), the respondents don’t explicitly communicate this requirements outright. This is especially true for the basic and the excitement features. The bottom-line is that you need to roll-up your sleeves and really spend time to analyze the data. Put on your thinking cap and have a group brainstorming session with the team. Make sure you have people with different disciplines and backgrounds to be part of that discussion.

A word of caution though - you can’t take everything that your customers say as gospel. Sometimes, some of the basic stuff that they need are just way over-the-top. Implementing them would just cause more problems. Another problem is that we find that customers don’t really know how to articulate a “wow” feature. The key is to identify a latent need or a “I wish I could..” from the research and think about how to go about solving this for them.

Can you give me some general examples of basic, performance and excitement features for websites?

Hopefully, yes….soon. Here’s where we’re at right now:

1. We’ve adapted the KANO model and used our online survey tool to gather customer requirements.
2. We structured the survey and the questions specifically to identify the basic, performance and excitement factors.
3. We’ve collected about 15,000 respondents from all over the world. Our study only covers Singapore websites. We hope to start with Malaysia and Thailand soon.
4. We took this data and put it into a text data mining tool (we’ve tried using SPSS Text Analysis for Surveys but we want to experiment with other tools as well, such as RapidMiner/YALE, which is an open source solution).

At this point, we’re still analyzing the data but the great part is that we’re starting to see a pattern. It seems like there is a possibility of creating a generic list of basic, performance and wow factors that most websites should (may?) have.

Its still early days yet, but I hope to get to publish some updates over the next few months. So do stay tuned. The first update will probably come out by the end of September.

Measurement | Comments | Trackback