Customer requirement
Under customer requirements (or customer requirements ) is understood in the business conditions of a customer or group of customers to a product or a service .
The customer can also be defined as an in-house customer within a production or transaction process .
term
The term customer requirement is also used in connection with orders according to customer requirements or for customer order- related production . Unlike the customer is a customer requirement more or less exact conditions that must be met or need to be in order for a business between customer and supplier endures long as only at fulfillment of these conditions customer satisfaction can be achieved.
Economic importance
Customer requirements are the basis for the economic processes on the market , in which supply and demand control the price , while changing customer requirements require a continuous change in the offer of the company and the satisfaction of needs has a significant influence on customer loyalty .
Distinctions
Customer requirements can be roughly divided into minimum requirements and “ nice-to-have ” requirements. The term stands for things that are more of a “can” than a “must”, but offer the customer additional benefits in the form of design , function or the like.
When analyzing customer satisfaction in the Kano model , customer requirements are divided into basic requirements , performance requirements and enthusiasm requirements . Depending on the requirements, an even more detailed differentiation and analysis method for customer requirements or customer requests is possible in the Kano model. In addition to the characteristics mentioned (basis, performance, enthusiasm), further requirements are then converted into characteristics of the product or service (such as rejection characteristics and insignificant characteristics).
In addition to the Kano model, the Six Sigma quality and process optimization method also uses tools that are used, among other things, to record and structure customer requirements and to correlate customer requirements with quality features of products and services. The latter is done with the help of a component of the Quality Function Deployment tool used in quality management for quality assurance , the so-called House of Quality .
Determination of customer requirements
To determine customer requirements on the anonymous market , instruments of market research such as surveys (personal, written and / or telephone surveys ) are used, while personalized customer surveys and customer satisfaction analyzes can be used with known customers .
In safety-critical industries such as the aviation industry , the automotive industry or the food industry , the customer requirements are often very clearly described in requirement lists and communicated directly from the customer to the supplier. These often clearly exceed legal requirements and the content of certification standards and thus represent a further dimension to be taken into account in the internal rules of quality management .
Processes
In order to meet the most diverse customer requirements on the market, more or less specific customer processes (which can only be standardized to a limited extent under certain circumstances) run in every company , which can themselves consist of a large number of business processes that are (in) visible to the customer .
literature
- N. Kano: Attractive Quality and Must-be Quality . in. Journal of the Japanese Society for Quality Control , H. 4, 1984, pp. 39-48