Scorched Earth Policy

Are you really focusing on the details in your business? So many leaders and entrepreneurs are missing the details that make a difference. Business is a “games of inches” and success is measured in fine increments. Unfortunately, many business and leadership models encourage you to stay focused on the “big picture” and the little things will take care of themselves. Some believe that the small details are time wasters and not worth paying attention to. This style unfortunately is leaving scorched earth across the landscape of the business or industry. Is it time to make a change and try the Kano Model?

Redefining the Process Using Kano Model

If you’re open to a different approach that could bring a new energy to your business, the Kano Model is worth considering. The Kano Model is a technique developed by Dr. Noriaki Kano to help understand the varying levels of value that customers place on different features of a product or service. Dr. Kano, alongside with his colleagues at the University of Tokyo, established a framework that can be used to assess customer satisfaction. By using this model and focusing on the smallest of detail in every aspect of your business, you can actually address problems before they present themselves and cause disruption.

Elements of Success with the Kano Model

There are three elements of consideration when using the Kano Model. When using this system or model, everyone is involved in finding improvement ideas. That is being proactive with the Kano Model. You don’t wait for an issue to present itself, before you bring forward the issues and the answers need for resolution. Here are the 3 elements to consider:

1. Dissatisfiers – These are products or services that are expected by the customer and when not fulfilled, they create significant disappointment.
2. Satisfiers – These are elements of service or a product that can either increase or decrease customer satisfaction.
3. Delights – These are features that absolutely delight customers. These features add premier or custom value to the product or service.

The biggest challenge that businesses face is how to delight the customer with a product or service, without spending much money.

Turning the Tide with the Kano Model

Businesses and leaders that are firmly committed to improving quality and customer service utilizing the Kano Model must be able to identify challenges by one source alone – the customer. Understanding the challenge leaves you no other recourse but to implement change that reduce or eliminate the challenges addressed by the customer. You can now turn the tide of your “scorched earth” leadership and focus on what is most important. Pay attention to the smallest detail and focus on the customer.

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Have you ever found your business stuck in a state where no matter what you do and how much effort the whole organization is putting towards improving its current product, things don’t seem to go anywhere? Or even worse, you end up alienating your core customer base with new changes that were supposed to add value to your offer. What’s going on here?

The problem is the false belief that simply adding new features to a product or updating existing ones is enough to increase customer satisfaction. Sometimes your customers value a specific aspect of your product much more than others, and prioritizing that aspect can lead to much better results.

Similarly, changing that part of the product in a way that’s perceived as wrong by your customers will lead to bad results in the long run. However, it’s not always that easy to know what kind of impact your changes are going to have to the overall picture. This is where Kano can come in handy.

Developing Features that Matter

Kano is a model that attempts to categorize the needs of your customers into several different types, according to how much effort you should be putting into each one, and what kinds of results you can expect in return. Generally speaking, you can split those needs into three different categories must-be, indifferent, and attractive.” The way, you spend your company’s resources including time and development efforts on those three categories that will have a major impact on how well you perform in the market.

And of course, knowing how to categorize items in those three different areas takes a lot of experience with your current market. Kano and market research are tightly connected, and Kano can quickly evolve to be your number one tool in deciding the overall direction of your development.

One important caveat is that customers’ needs change over time, not just according to your own developments, but according to the market as well. Today, you might be enjoying a solid market presence with a product that meets all expectations and hits all the right spots. But what if tomorrow one of your competitors comes up with a feature that attracts people incredibly well?

What usually happens in those cases is that a new attractive feature is introduced to the market, and whether you like it or not, it’s going to stabilize its position if people find it exciting enough. It may even become a must-be feature if more companies incorporate it in their designs, in which case you’ll find yourself in a troubled situation if you don’t adapt quickly.

Reevaluating Categories of Needs

All of this means that Kano is something that should be applied on a continuous basis instead of treating it as a one-time solution. You can’t expect your findings from a few months ago to still be relevant right now, for your next product, even if the market has seen little development since then. Sometimes even changes in other markets can result in a shift in your own, and you have to be prepared for those moments and account for them in your planning.

That’s why you should integrate Kano in your organization in a way that it’s a core component of your planning. It shouldn’t be an auxiliary tool that gets applied after the fact, it should be one of the main driving factors behind the way your products are evolving. That’s something that will take some time to properly master, but once your company has reached that point, you’ll find it much easier to align your work to customers’ needs.

Conclusion

The Kano model is very powerful when used right, but it’s no substitute for in-depth market research. It’s important to always keep an eye on the market and know when there is a major shift going on, and it’s equally important that Kano is integrated in your organization in such a way that it plays a major role in the planning and development of each new product. That way, you’ll know that each change you’re introducing is actually aligned with what your customers want in the best way possible.

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The Kano model is not really new, and it’s actually quite popular in many organizations nowadays. Its benefits are easy to see, and the model itself is intuitive and flexible enough to be applied to many different contexts. It can sometimes be difficult to convince the leadership of an organization that they should work with the Kano model, which is why it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the basic benefits that it provides to a company’s ability to satisfy their customers better.

Customer Requirements at the Forefront

Getting things right for your customer should be your top priority, but unfortunately not every development/production model works in that direction, or at least not on an immediate level. There are many ways you could potentially please your user base, and if you’re not careful, you may easily find yourself lost in a whirlwind of requirements.

One thing that the Kano model does well is that it allows you to prioritize the project requirements that truly matter, and put everything else to the side. Kano’s primary goal is to identify the three types of needs that your customers will have, and after you’ve pinpointed them, you’ll be able to focus on the ones that result in the biggest improvements in customer satisfaction.

Or in Kano terms, you’ll know which needs are must-be, and you’ll focus your efforts on them. Of course, it’s also important to pay attention to the other types of needs that’s why Kano identifies them in the first place but in a slightly different manner

Trimming Waste from Your Production

When you know that a certain need falls in the indifferent category, you’ll be able to avoid putting any significant amounts of work into it, taking away a large portion of waste from the workflow of the company in most cases. On the other hand, features that provide a one-dimensional relationship with the satisfaction of your users can be brought up to a baseline level that allows you to build on them and add more attractive features.

Waste is one of the least favorite words of lean leaders, and if you’re having trouble convincing your organization that Kano is the right model for its production style, then you should just spend some time discussing the potential benefits in waste reduction. Make sure you bring up some concrete examples related to past failures of the company to satisfy the needs of its customers, and present Kano as a tool that can reduce those incidents by a good degree.

Adapting Kano to Your Own Specific Organization

Sooner or later you’ll find that some of the needs of your customers don’t exactly fit in the three categories outlined by Kano. That’s not an indicator that something is wrong in your organization, and it’s actually not a rare occurrence in companies with a more complicated workflow and/or advanced products. The important thing is to remember that Kano can be very flexible when used right, and you should look into adapting it to the specific needs of your company when the time for that comes.

Don’t go too deep though, you can probably make some simple changes to the model and get great results, especially if you’re already experienced in applying Kano to your specific company’s workflow. A single extra category can often resolve the problem completely, and if that doesn’t work, it may be time to reevaluate how you’re approaching your product development and what exactly you’re trying to accomplish in terms of customer response.

Conclusion

Kano is by far one of the most useful tools in the business world, and it can produce great results with relatively little effort if you’re experienced enough in its application. Once you’ve developed a strong intuition for what Kano is all about, you’ll find yourself applying it to all sorts of projects with ease and without even putting too much thought into it. And once it becomes such an integral part of your toolset, you’ll find your own productivity increasing noticeably when working on your projects.

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The Kano model, named after its creator Noriaki Kano, aims to standardize the way companies see the needs of their customers, and is a great tool in resolving one of the most common problems that arise in modern organizations misunderstood requirements. Like many other methodologies related to production and manufacturing, Kano attempts to abstract things into several categories, allowing you to think in terms of classifiers rather than trying to attach your own attributes to requirements.

Kano works by separating the different types of needs into several categories. Depending on the literature you’re referencing, you might see those needs split into three or four types, and whether or not you’re going to work with the more fine-grained version depends on the product you’re developing. Here, we will look at customer needs on three levels.

Must-Be Needs

Customers always expect something from a certain type of product. A car must be able to be driven. A smartphone must be able to make calls and send texts. A television must show a picture with sound¦ and so on. The point is, these are features that your customers will expect from your product by default. They won’t feel any more impressed by their presence you don’t buy a phone and go wow, this can actually make calls!; however, be wary of the opposite. If your product doesn’t meet those must-be needs, customers will feel significantly dissatisfied.

In fact, lacking even a small bit of core functionality in any kind of product can result in a sharp decline of customer satisfaction, and it’s a situation you must avoid at all cost. This also means that you will need proper quality control on all levels even if you meant to implement a feature, if it turns out that it wasn’t properly tested and doesn’t work correctly, this will still draw negative attention to your release and may even kill your product completely.

Performance Needs

This refers to the standard functionality of the product or service you’re providing, and according to Kano, they provide a linear 1:1 return on investment in most cases. In other words, the better this need is satisfied, the happier customers will be, but you shouldn’t expect an exponential growth of your results. Still, even linear progression should be good enough for most companies that work on some product.

However, even though the returns on your investment in the satisfaction of performance needs grow in a linear pattern, the effort required to implement those improvements tends to grow on a sharper incline. This means that after some point, you’ll start to see diminishing returns as you’ll be putting significantly more effort to push the line up.

Attractive Needs

And on the other end of the spectrum, we have needs which customers typically don’t expect, but add a lot to their overall impression of the product. A computer operating system that works smoothly and intuitively, with beautiful animations and effects is a good example of that. The auto industry spends surprising amount of time and money researching the sound car doors make when they’re closed, because it adds a small but important bit of extra satisfaction to their customers.

Every little bit helps a lot here, and these features can really help sell the point that your product is a premium one. However, you must also be careful with how much attention you’re paying to this aspect of your development. If your customers see that all of your products come with a huge emphasis on attractive needs, they will eventually start to expect this as the baseline, leading to a decline in positive responses.

Conclusion

Kano also recognizes indifferent needs that is, needs which are completely unrelated to what the customer expects to receive and add nothing to the product’s value. On the bright side, the absence of those features typically has no negative impact either. The important point to take away from this is that indifferent needs are a waste of time and effort and should be avoided.

Communicating the value of your product successfully can be as simple as understanding what customers expect to receive from it, and once you’ve started looking into the Kano model in detail, you’ll realize that it’s not actually that complicated to figure out what your typical customer is looking for when purchasing one of your products.

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The Kano model is a great tool for adapting your product/service to the actual demand of your customer base, but it should be used with a degree of caution. It works very well when you already have some experience with the relevant market, but you need some data to drive your decisions, otherwise you won’t get much of a benefit from Kano as opposed to just making random choices.

Understanding Different Needs

The whole basis of the Kano model is splitting the needs of your customers into three categories, and organizing your work so that you can satisfy the needs that really matter in the grand scheme of things. However, this assumes that you can accurately categorize your customers’ needs, as using the wrong category can severely degrade the performance of your organization.

After all, if you believe a feature is of low importance, but it’s actually a must-be, you will obviously miss a huge opportunity to improve the initial impressions of your clients. And in the opposite case, if you spend too much effort on a feature that ends up changing nothing in terms of performance and reception, that’s a huge waste that will eventually drag down your organization.

Leveraging Old Data Sets

This drives us to an important point if you don’t have preexisting data sets related to the specific product you’re developing, you may not be able to get a good overview of the different types of needs of its consumers. With that in mind, the initial development of the product’s very first version should be driven by a more experimental approach, although if you can draw on data from external sources, this can definitely be helpful as well.

And as you’re probably guessing, the data generated during this first run will be of critical importance later on if you want to continue working in that market and you want to make sure that your next product will be a noticeable improvement over the first iteration. How you’re going to record and store all that data is entirely dependent on the type of product you’re working on, and while some industries have established standards for data collection, retention and analysis, in some cases you’ll have to come up with your own custom implementation.

The Changing Nature of Needs

Another problem you may face in this context is that customers’ needs can change along with the design of the product itself. For example, you may unknowingly introduce a must-be feature, which then changes each customer’s perception of other aspects of your product. That way, in the long run, some features will move down in the table and will turn into indifferent needs, while something else might get promoted to a must-be feature.

That’s why it’s important to run regular market analysis on your customer and always be aware of their exact requirements and opinions. This is also necessary due to the volatile nature of most markets themselves, especially today in a time when the internet is making everything so dynamic and unpredictable.

The good news is that this system can also be very beneficial for collecting opinions and impressions from a large number of customers (both current and potential ones), and as long as you leverage your presence on the market correctly, you shouldn’t have any problems building a good model of your customers’ needs, and figuring out the exact direction to take your next product in.

Conclusion

The Kano model is a good framework for addressing many types of issues that arise in the development of a product, but it relies on preexisting data to make accurate decisions. If you’re developing an entirely new type of product or you don’t have much experience in its relevant market in the first place, you will need to do some groundwork before you can apply Kano effectively. Once you’ve gone over that barrier, you’ll find the model to work very well on a small scale as well as a large one, and it will give you a valuable insight into the way your company should work.

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