An analytical approach to customer requirement information processing

Abstract

‘Customer requirements’ (CRs) management is a key component of customer relationship management (CRM). By processing customer-focused information, CRs management plays an important role in enterprise systems (ESs). Although two main CRs analysis methods, quality function deployment (QFD) and Kano model, have been applied to many fields by many enterprises in the past several decades, the limitations such as complex processes and operations make them unsuitable for online businesses among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Currently, most SMEs do not have the resources to implement QFD or Kano model. In this article, we propose a method named customer requirement information (CRI), which provides a simpler and easier way for SMEs to run CRs analysis. The proposed method analyses CRs from the perspective of information and applies mathematical methods to the analysis process. A detailed description of CRI's acquisition, classification and processing is provided.

Keywords:

• enterprise systems
• customer requirements
• customer requirement information (CRI)
• acquisition

Acknowledgements

This research was funded and supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50905133 & No. 50935005), the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province, China (Grant No. 2009CDB255), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2010-VI-003) and the State Scholarship Fund of China Scholarship Council (No. 2011695033).