Mining the Customer's Voice and Patent Data for Strategic Product Quality Function Deployment

Abstract

The goal of research and development for new product and service development is to satisfy customers. A company that satisfies customers with short life cycle products like smartphones that match or exceed expectations builds brand equity and a global competitive advantage. Companies are challenged with the task of identifying the market demand that evolves with technological innovations. Since many of the short product life cycle communications products are continuously changing, capturing and measuring the satisfaction of customers is increasingly difficult. One approach to accurately identify market demand and customer satisfaction with the functions of products is to listen to what is said among social networks. The Internet has empowered customers to express their opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and purchase intentions about products using community platforms, social media, customer blogs, and other networks. The words, expressed on these platforms, represent the voice of customers and provide collective and dynamic intelligence about the users' purchase intentions as well as experience using the products. Patent documents disclose the technological evolutions of a domain, and contribute to the features and characteristics of products that differentiate between brands and build customer expectations and loyalty. This research proposes a systematic methodology to combine collective intelligence using Internet web crawling and text mining to access the voice of customers. Patent information (retrieved from global patent search engines and analytic function mining of the patent content) provides critical information for planning strategic product repositioning and improvements that match the voice of customers and increase brand loyalty. The systematic extended QFD approach provides intelligent and dynamic demand-compliant strategies for developing new products and services.