Preface

How I learned about the value of the Kano model

“I know it will take a lot of time and effort”, the IT Director said, “but it’s essential for our new online ordering platform. No-one will want to use the platform without it.”

He moved a post-it note that said “automated end-to-end ordering” to the upper-right corner of the whiteboard he was standing in front of. On the whiteboard was a graph: the vertical line said “contribution to business objectives” and the horizontal one said “effort required”.

The other people in the room had a downcast look. What the IT Director was actually saying was that it would take at least a year before the new ordering platform would be ready for launch.

The team that was assembled in the room were people from sales, marketing, IT and production. They had gathered at the company headquarters for a week to decide what features of its new online ordering platform to release first. This was day four, and things were looking grim. Everyone was eager to launch the pilot platform, but it didn't look like that was going to happen fast.

A colleague of mine and myself were there for the week too. The team had asked us to participate and help the team define features and decide on the pilot version of the platform. In the first part of the week, we had assembled features from the team itself and from interviews we did with distributors, who would be the users of the platform.

Automated end-to-end ordering was one such feature. The idea was that distributors would assemble their orders in a basket, and with one click everything else would be taken care of: invoicing, delivery, the works.

"The basic expectation is that you can order anything with just a few clicks", the IT Director said. “End-to-end ordering means we will have to integrate our accounting, manufacturing and logistics systems and redefine our processes. But the benefit to us is huge: less manual work, less errors, more time for sales work”.

His arguments were compelling. Everyone agreed that “end-to-end ordering” should be at the top of the pilot features. To be of any value to anyone, the platform pilot must have end-to-end ordering.

Another feature that ranked high on the list was the “milk-run”. Like milk floats of the past, the idea was to schedule fixed delivery routes. Distributors could then ask for an order to be added to one of these routes. This solved a problem some smaller distributors had: they did not always want to make small orders because of the cost of transport. They waited until they could fill a full truck with their orders. But waiting sometimes led to depleted stocks, and of course it also meant the company was taking in less orders. The milk run idea was not very hard to implement and seemed of great value, so it rose to the top of the list of features to include in the pilot.

A feature that hung around the bottom of the ranking was "catalogue of marketing material". Distributors had told us that they sent out newsletters, catalogues and promotions to their customers. Providing them with the right materials (photo’s, logo's, …) would help them save time and allow our client to have more control over its branding. Although the team saw some value in this feature, it wasn’t deemed important enough to include it in the pilot right away.

When we started this mission with our client, our plan had always been to validate the ordering platform roadmap with their customers. I had been wanting to use the Kano model for a while already, and this consulting mission was the perfect opportunity. The Kano method looked like a good tool to quantify the customer value of a feature and assign a priority.

The day after our internal prioritisation workshop, I got on the phone with distributors again. I used the Kano method to gauge how the distributors felt about the ideas we had for the ordering platform.

It turned out that distributors didn't care about automated end-to-end ordering (which was #1 in our internal ranking). They had no trust in a system that would take care of everything. They wanted their sales reps to validate their orders and be able to talk to a human who wouldn't blame the system whenever something went wrong.

Feelings were split about the milk-run idea: smaller distributors were in favour, larger distributors didn't like it all. Larger distributors sometimes sold to smaller distributors, and the milk run would take that business away from them.

As for marketing collateral (something the team thought would be of little importance), it turned out distributors considered it to be the principal reason why they'd consider using the platform. It saved them a lot of time. In fact, distributors didn't really want to use an online ordering platform. The presence of marketing collateral would be a gateway to getting them to adopt the platform.

The team was astounded and ecstatic. Now they had a clear idea of what the platform's pilot should look like. We had a set of features that were contributing to the overall business goal of less errors, less time spent on order entry and more time for qualitative distributor relationships. Moreover, it would only take a few months to launch the platform as automated end-to-end ordering was no longer required.

But most importantly, we had created a pilot that distributors would want to use and we had the numbers to prove it. Management was easily convinced, and the launch of the platform turned out to be a big success. It's been several years since that consulting mission. Every time I meet that client, we reminisce about the good job we did together. The client has adopted the same customer-first approach for the further evolution of the ordering platform and it is still going strong.

I consider the Kano model pivotal to the success we had. Without it, we might have launched a pilot platform that got no traction in the market, at great cost to my client. I've been using and researching the method uncountable times since, and it has never dissapointed me.