Kansei engineering with online review mining methodology for robust service design

Abstract

Kansei Engineering (KE) has shown its prominent applicability in service design and development, focusing on translating and interpreting customers’ emotional needs (Kansei) into service characteristics. It is critical and promising as the services sector has grown faster than the manufacturing sector in developing economies in the past three decades. It accounted for an average of 55% of GDP in some developing economies. KE’s flexibility in collaborating with other methods and covering various service settings shows its unique superiority. However, there is criticism of the collected Kansei’s validity and the proposed solution’s robustness. It might be potentially caused by the dynamics of customer emotional needs and various service settings. As a result, Kansei is found to be somewhat fuzzy, unclear, and ambiguous. Hence, a more structured KE methodology incorporating the Kansei text mining process for robust service design is proposed. Kansei text mining approach will extract and summarize service attributes and their corresponding affective responses based on the online product descriptions and customer reviews. The Taguchi method will support the robustness of the proposed improvement strategy. An empirical study of a zoo as a tourism attraction service and its practical implication is discussed and validated in the proposed integrative framework.

Keywords:

• Kansei engineering
• robust design
• mining methodology
• service innovation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Department of Industrial Engineering University of Surabaya and the research grant by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology Republic of Indonesia under a research scheme of Excellent Basic Research of Higher Education (PDUPT) with a contract number 003/SP2H/LT-MULTI-PDPK/LL7/2021.