Customer satisfaction over time

You'll notice product features moving from one category over time, but how a single customer values your product attributes changes over time too. Different attributes of your product gain and lose importance throughout the customer life-cycle. It's important to recognize this, as not knowing about a customer's relation to your product can lead to suboptimal decisions.

Mittal (2001) gives the example of an automotive firm that surveyed customers who had purchased a car in the last two months from its dealerships. It turned out that these customers valued dealership service twice more than vehicle quality. "Based on this finding a senior manager decided to divert significant resources from product development to dealership improvement efforts. However, when the same customers were surveyed after 24 months, analysis showed that vehicle ownership was far more important than dealership service" (Mittal et al., 2001).

See Mittal 2001:

• andere zaken worden belangrijk

• exposure is belangrijk

• customer self-selection (na een paar jaar kan je niet-klanten niet meer bevragen)

When you analyse the results of your Kano study, make sure you take this into account. You can choose to focus on new customers for instance, or make sure you know w