Applying Kansei engineering to design logistics services - A case of home delivery service

Abstract

Home delivery service (HDS) has grown fast in recent years because more and more customers engage in Internet and television shopping. Moreover, due to the rising competition in the HDS sector, service providers need to put more concentration on the continual improvement and differentiation of service to maintain the competitive advantage. After experiencing the current services, customers are always expecting the new ones. Thus, the idea of new service design never ends. Designers always have to insight into the real feelings of customers so that they could design the new service, which is able to meet customers\' expectation. Kansei engineering is a means to transform real voices of customers into the product and service design. This method is able to quantify the relationship between feelings represented by simple words and design elements. In this study, the Partial Least Square (PLS) is used to analyze the relationships between the real feelings of customers and characteristics of HDS. Finally, this study combines those characteristics, which are strongly related to important feelings, to obtain the original idea of new design of HDS. Relevance to industry: As stated in this abstract, our study offers an exemplification on applying Kansei engineering to design service in service industries. Specifically, along with the application of Kansei engineering, the research findings offer a technique for service design of service industries. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.