Customer Complaints Analysis Using Text Mining and Outcome-Driven Innovation Method for Market-Oriented Product Development

The rapid increase in the quantity of customer data has promoted the necessity to analyse these data. Recent progress in text mining has enabled analysis of unstructured text data such as customer suggestions, customer complaints and customer feedback. Much research has been attempted to use insights gained from text mining to identify customer needs to guide development of market-oriented products. However, the previous research has a drawback that identifies limited customer needs based on product features. To overcome the limitation, this paper presents application of text mining analysis of customer complaints to identify customers’ true needs by using the Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) method. This paper provides a method to analyse customer complaints by using the concept of job. The ODI-based analysis contributes to identification of customer latent needs during the pre-execution and post-execution steps of product use by customers that previous methods cannot discover. To explain how the proposed method can identify customer requirements, we present a case study of stand-type air conditioners. The analysis identified two needs that experts had not identified but regarded as important. This research helps to identify requirements of all the points at which customers want to obtain help from the product.