Will a Kano Survey do everything I need for a VOC Project?

Posted on July 24th, 2015 by Dave Verduyn in FAQ, Kano Model

Remember, the Kano Model (And Kano Survey), is a subset of a good Voice of Customer/Client effort. The Kano Survey by itself will not accomplish most project goals. VOC Project goals are typically much bigger than just a Kano Survey. (The Kano survey by itself classifies Needs or Features into 5 categories – B, P, E, I, R) Typical VOC project goals are to A) Understand who the Customers/Client are, B) Understand What their Needs are, C) Prioritize their Needs, D) Set performance goals/targets for each of the needs, and D) Begin to develop solutions for each of the Customer/Client needs. An typical “Kano Survey” will only do part of that so needs to involve additional VOC activities. A typical Kano Survey has the following elements:

  1. A list of “paired” questions to determine the Kano classification (B, P, E, I, or R)
  2. A separate list of questions to determine importance’s of Needs knowing not all needs are of equal importance. We recommend a technique called AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) to determine relative importances. It is a very effective effort that compares 2 Needs at a time to ultimately calculate Importances.
    • EXAMPLE Q1: “What is more important, Shelf Life or Accuracy of Inventory?”
    • EXAMPLE Q2: How much more important is the one over the other”?
    • The survey provides responses to choose from and goes on to automatically calculate and normalize relative importances.
  3. A separate list of questions to determine current satisfaction of the Needs is also recommended (if appropriate) Here we simply ask their satisfaction of the needs on a “polar scale”
    EXAMPLE Q3: “On a poor to excellent scale, how accurate is your current inventory?”

Before the Kano Survey is even thought about, there are several qualitative questions that should be asked to get the list of needs for the Kano Survey. In our Kano Workshops we go over at least 2 dozen open ended questions to get at Customer Needs for the quantitative research which will follow. The survey results will then be analyzed for priorities and an action plan will be developed which includes determining/brainstorming the conceptual solution to the need, lead responsibility, detailed design of the solution, etc.

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