A prescriptive approach to understand customer needs using value-focused thinking

Abstract

In the paper a prescriptive approach to understand customer needs is proposed, which helps to transform the subjective, human-centric problem into a more objective, decision-making problem. By recognizing the diversity of levels or granularities of initially identified customer statements, techniques of fundamental objectives hierarchy and means-ends objectives network are utilized to qualitatively structure the customer statements. A set of customer needs suitable for measuring is then identified. By carefully selecting an appropriate measure for each customer need in the set, quantitative value model for conjoint measurement is constructed with multiple attributes preference theory. The implications of quantitative understanding on customer needs in terms of values, e.g. weights and even swap, are further discussed. The business benefit of the approach is the breadth and depth of understanding of customer needs and values.