• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
• /
• v.34 no.5
• /
• pp.844-855
• /
• 2010

An important issue for the improvement of product quality is to identify and understand the customer-required attributes of a product. This paper identifies and analyzes customer-required attributes of formal knitwear for middle age and elderly women through the use of the Kano model in order to develop competitive products. Various research methods were used in this study. Customer voices for formal knitwear were collected by means of brainstorming and in-depth interviews. The collected customer voices were transformed into customer-required attributes with the use of an affinity diagram. In addition, the data was collected by means of a questionnaire and was statistically analyzed to examine the dimensions of customer-required attributes on the basis of the Kano model. The results are as follows. Five categories of customer-required attributes were identified (symbolism, aesthetic, fitness, usefulness, and maintenance). The analysis based on the Kano model identifies a strong one-dimensional quality in all of the categories of customer-required attributes and the attractive quality that includes a one-dimensional quality in the categories of fitness and usefulness. The findings of this study demonstrate the applicability of the affinity diagram for apparel that educates formal knitwear developers of the customer-required attributes that they should strategically focus on in order to develop competitive products.

• Health Policy and Management
• /
• v.21 no.2
• /
• pp.263-278
• /
• 2011

As the competition among hospitals become intensified, hospital management is required to carry out more effective marketing and positioning of the hospital. Successful positioning of a hospital requires the knowledge about how the concrete attributes inherent in the medical service associated with the customer values that customers seek eventually in the medical service. Thus, it is required for hospital management to understand which hospital attributes should be emphasized in order to improve the customer values. The hierarchical structure of service attributes can provide valuable information about effective positioning and advertising. To obtain such knowledge, we employed the order analysis technique as an objective means-end chain method. Order analysis is useful for identifying the causal structure among attributes. Thus, we can examine the underlying causal relationship and eventually the vertical structure of hospital selection attributes. For this study, we conducted a survey to obtain 370 responses for the analysis. The result suggests that hospital management had better increase the scale of hospital, improve the services of health care providers, and modernize the hospital facilities and equipments so as to enhance customer values and eventually to lead them to recommend the hospital to others. Our findings would provide the valuable information for hospital management to develop the more effective hospital positioning and marketing strategies.

• International Journal of Quality Innovation
• /
• v.5 no.1
• /
• pp.34-42
• /
• 2004

In the traditional use of conjoint analysis, in order to evaluate the relative importance of several elements composing a service, interviewed customers are asked to express their judgement about different scenarios (specific combinations of elements). In order to reduce the number of possible scenarios, design of experiments methodology is usually exploited. Previous experiences show that, even a limited number of proposed scenarios cause difficulty in answering for the interviewed customer if the scenarios differ for elements of very low interest to him/her. Consequently, a high rate of abandon of the interview has been observed. In this study it is assumed that a service can be decomposed in several improvable elements and/or enriched with new "optionals". In both cases, what under study is assumed to be a set of dichotomous attributes. For each of these attributes, its marginal contribution to customer satisfaction has to be modelled and estimated. To obtain the required information, an opportune questionnaire is proposed to a sample of interviewed customers. An interviewing procedure consisting in a customer driven design of scenarios is followed, starting from the full-optional scenario and eliminating one by one the less satisfying elements. For each interviewed customer, a ranking of attributes is so obtained. Then, by asking the interviewed customer to evaluate on a metric scale the scenarios he previously selected, a rating of attributes can also be obtained. A case study conducted in collaboration with a public transportation company is presented. Contrarily to previous experiences, the abandon rate proved extremely reduced.y reduced.

• Journal of the Korean Dietetic Association
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.208-225
• /
• 2010

Our research consisted of a qualitative study investigating the quality attributes of university foodservices through focus group interviews and a quantitative study evaluating service quality of university foodservices through a survey. Sixteen quality attributes were derived and customer satisfaction questionnaires included these 16 quality attributes with a five-point Likert scale. An Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) model was applied in order to identify operational strategies necessary to improve service quality. The survey questionnaires were distributed to 600 university students enrolled in a university located in Kwangju and statistical analysis was performed on 555 surveys using an SPSS package. Overall customer satisfaction with the quality of university foodservices was relatively low (under 3.0) while the expectation was inclined to be high (over 4.0). The main reasons for using the university foodservice were given as inexpensive price (67.6%) and time saving (22.9%). A factor analysis of 16 quality attributes revealed two separate factors: food quality (Cronbach's alpha=0.911) and service quality (Cronbach's alpha=0.934). Variety of menu, convenient location, and sanitation of utensils and facilities were identified by an IPA model as factors needing improvement in operational strategies.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
• /
• v.42 no.3
• /
• pp.176-183
• /
• 2019

The environmental changes in the Korean cosmetic medical service industry in the $21^{st}$ century are forming intense competition among medical institutions due to the quantitative expansion of its market. For stable growth of the cosmetic medical service industry, continuous quality improvement is necessary based on empirical research on the quality of cosmetic medical services rather than external expansion. The purpose of this study is to classify the quality attributes of cosmetic medical service using Kano model and to derive the degree of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of each quality attributes through Customer Satisfaction Coefficient (CSC). Through this, the study identified strategic priorities and suggested specific step-by-step approaches and quality improvement priorities that can increase customer satisfaction using the Potential Customer Satisfaction Improvement Index (PCSI Index). Based on SERVPERF, this study used measurement tools consisting of five dimensions : tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. In addition, it was used of measurement items reconstructed into positive, negative, and satisfaction questions for Kano model analysis, CSC analysis, and PCSI Index analysis. A total of 300 medical consumers who experienced cosmetic medical services for the past one year in medical institutions such as plastic surgery and dermatology were collected with convenient sampling. As a result, urgent items for improving the quality of service using the PCSI Index, 'Consideration for customer benefits' in empathy category was followed by 'Immediate help' and 'Sincere response' in responsiveness category, and 'Understanding customer needs' in empathy category, respectively. That is, it is required to improve human service quality attributes such as empathy and responsiveness rather than physical service quality attributes. This study contributes practically in that it provides specific and discriminatory approaches to improve customer satisfaction on cosmetic medical service quality and suggests improvement priorities.

• Proceedings of the Korea Inteligent Information System Society Conference
• /
• 1999.10a
• /
• pp.347-354
• /
• 1999

The credit rating represents an assessment of the relative level of risk associated with the timely payments required by the debt obligation. In this paper, we present a new approach to credit rating of customers based on the rough set theory. The concept of a rough set appeared to be an effective tool for the analysis of customer information systems representing knowledge gained by experience. The customer information system describes a set of customers by a set of multi-valued attributes, called condition attributes. The customers are classified into groups of risk subject to an expert's opinion, called decision attribute. A natural problem of knowledge analysis consists then in discovering relationships, in terms of decision rules, between description of customers by condition attributes and particular decisions. The rough set approach enables one to discover minimal subsets of condition attributes ensuring an acceptable quality of classification of the customers analyzed and to derive decision rules from the customer information system which can be used to support decisions about rating new customers. Using the rough set approach one analyses only facts hidden in data, it does not need any additional information about data and does not correct inconsistencies manifested in data; instead, rules produced are categorized into certain and possible. A real problem of the evaluation of the evaluation of credit rating by a department store is studied using the rough set approach.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.30 no.2
• /
• pp.1-18
• /
• 2023

Recently, as technology development has accelerated and product life cycles have been shortened, it is necessary to derive key product features from customers in the R&D planning and evaluation stage. More companies want differentiated competitiveness by providing consumer-tailored products based on big data and artificial intelligence technology. To achieve this, the need to correctly grasp the required quality, which is a requirement of consumers, is increasing. However, the existing methods are centered on suppliers or domain experts, so there is a gap from the actual perspective of consumers. In other words, product attributes were defined by suppliers or field experts, but this may not consider consumers' actual perspective. Accordingly, the demand for deriving the product's main attributes through reviews containing consumers' perspectives has recently increased. Therefore, we propose a review data analysis-based required quality methodology containing customer requirements. Specifically, a pre-training language model with a good understanding of Korean reviews was established, consumer intent was correctly identified, and key contents were extracted from the review through a combination of KeyBERT and topic modeling to derive the required quality for each product. RevBERT, a Korean review domain-specific pre-training language model, was established through further pre-training. By comparing the existing pre-training language model KcBERT, we confirmed that RevBERT had a deeper understanding of customer reviews. In addition, all processes other than that of selecting the required quality were linked to the automation process, resulting in the automation of deriving the required quality based on data.

• Proceedings of the Safety Management and Science Conference
• /
• 2002.05a
• /
• pp.227-230
• /
• 2002

This paper presents an analytic method of quality function deployment(QFD) that is to maximize customer satisfaction subject to technical and economic sides in process design. We have used Wasserman's normalization method and the analytical hierarchy process(AHP) to determine the intensity of the relationship between customer requirements and process design attributes. This paper also shows cost-quality model the tradeoff between quality and cost as a linear programming(LP) with new constraints that have designated special process required allocating firstly The cost-quality function deployment of piston ring is presented to illustrate the feasibility of such techniques.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.169-178
• /
• 2002

This paper presents an analytic method of quality function deployment(QFD) that is to maximize customer satisfaction subject to technical and economic sides in process design. We have used Wasserman's normalization method and the analytical hierarchy process(AHP) to determine the intensity of the relationship between customer requirements and process design attributes. This paper also shows cost-quality model the tradeoff between quality and cost as a linear programming(LP) with new constraints that have designated special process required allocating firstly. The cost-quality function deployment of piston ring is presented to illustrate the feasibility of such techniques.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
• /
• v.23 no.2
• /
• pp.184-193
• /
• 2008

The purpose of this study was to determine the detailed customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction factors of family restaurants in Korea, and to then classify the factors into 3 groups, inlcuding core service, quality service, and basic service. ‘Core service’ represents the critical factors that generate both satisfaction and dissatisfaction; ‘quality service’ generates only satisfaction; and ‘basic service’ generates only dissatisfaction. This categorization is based on Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory (1976) as well as Cadotte & Turgeon (1988). Based on the characteristics of the three groups, differentiation strategies in managing customer service were suggested to the family restaurant managers. A qualitative research method, termed the critical incident technique (CIT), was used in the study. This method helps researchers find new factors or attributes by grouping key issues from the anecdotes (critical incidents) and then categorizing common factors from the key issues. This research categorized key satisfiers and dissatisfiers into 33 factors, which were from 402 critical incidents described by 261 respondents. Eleven factors (response to service failures, food taste and quality, attention paid to customers, coupon/mileage point/discount card, customer’s ordinary requests, waiting, food diversity, food price, facility sanitation, checking out, customer’s special requests) were classified into core service, which required maximum management not regarding the level of customer satisfaction. Six factors (employee attitude, event, education and explanation, complementary food, customer’s mistakes, attention paid to children) were classified into quality service, which required differentiation strategy management. Finally, nine factors (speed of food service, employee’s mistakes, food sanitation, atmosphere and interior, seating, forcing orders, parking, other customers, reservations) were classified into basic service, which required minimum management at the level of the industry standards.