Abstract:

In product development, the foremost issue is to identify "what" the customers’ expectations would be from the product. As a promising approach to the product development, Quality Function Deployment also gives crucial importance to the collection and analysis of Voice of the Customer (VoC) to deduce true customer needs. Data sources of VoC include surveys, interviews, focus groups, gemba visits as well as customer reviews which can be collected through call centers, internet homepages, blogs, and microblogs in social networks. Customers’ verbatim or reviews obtained from these resources require more detailed extraction to define them as the positive restatement of problems, opportunities or image issues independent of the product or the solution. Basically, this clarification process is a content analysis in which the developers usually seek to extract and classify the spoken-unspoken customer needs from VoC. This labor-intensive manual approach brings subjectivity to the analysis and can take so much time in the case of having condensed and large-volume text data. During the past decade, the field of text mining has enabled to solve these kinds of problems efficiently by unlocking hidden information and developing new knowledge; exploring new horizons; and improving the research process and quality. This paper utilizes a particular algorithm of text clustering, a recently popular field of interest in text mining, to analyze VoC and shows how text mining can also support the clarification process for better extraction of customer needs. Practical implications are presented through analysis of online customer reviews for a product.

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