Integrating disparate innovativeness of customers into the analysis of customer requirements

Abstract

Today, the body of literature has been almost unanimous that there exist mainly two different customer groups to consume new technology-based products or services: innovative and pragmatic groups. Those two groups of customers are dissimilar in terms of the time when they adopt a high-tech product and technology readiness. This reveals the needs for considering the fundamental discrepancy of technology innovativeness between innovative group and pragmatic group in the analysis of technological requirements. However, few studies take the heterogeneity of customers into consideration when classifying and prioritizing customer requirements. The discrepancies in technology innovativeness of customers are not being reflected even in the Kano model representative of customer requirement analysis. In response, this paper suggests an extended Kano approach to integrating disparate innovativeness of customers. Firstly, customers are classifies in innovative and pragmatic groups according to the difference of innovativeness with technology readiness index being used as a measure. Secondly, a Kano integration matrix, of which two groups become the column and row value, is newly introduced. Lastly, considering the discrepancy of two groups, four new types of customer requirements are defined. For each category, we specify its impact to customer satisfaction.