Phase 1 of the Design Cycle/ Primary Design Phases

CONCEPTUAL DESIGN/FEASIBILITY STUDY

Conceptual Design or Feasibility Study is the process by which a product design is initiated, carried to the
point of creating a number of possible solutions or concepts and then narrowing down to a single best concept.

Designs can be futile unless satisfying the need of the user/customer is feasible. At this stage, the product
appears in abstract forms, is it feasible or not? The alternative solutions should be subjected to physical and
economic analyses and must be realizable from both analyses. The feasibility study using analysis of several
alternatives establishes if the design concept can be realized and accepted.
Conceptual design consists of the following steps:
 Identification of customer needs,
 Problem definition,
 Gathering Information,
 Concept Generation/Conceptualization and
 Evaluation of Concepts/Concept selection

IDENTIFICATION OF CUSTOMER NEEDS

Identification of customer needs is one of the important activities in conceptual design. The first step of the
design process is to identify as clearly as possible what are the customers’ needs that should be satisfied by a
product. The main objective of identifying customer needs is to completely understand the customers’ needs
since it is the customers/users’ desire that drive the development of a new product or modification of an
existing product.
There are four levels of customer requirements/needs:
1. Expectations: These refer to the basic attributes, which one would expect to be present in the product
as standard features,
2. Spokens: These refer to the specific features, which the customer would say and want as a feature in
the product.
3. Unspokens: These refer to the attributes of a product that the customers would not generally ask for
but are still important and hence, cannot be ignored.
4. Exciters which are also known as delighters and are features that make the product unique and
distinguish the same from their competitors.

These requirements must be satisfied at each level before moving and addressing those at the next level. Not
all customer requirements are equal, hence it becomes very essential to identify these requirements which are
important and ensure that they are delivered in the product. To do this the design team must adopt a strategy
for actively seeking the customer’s opinion called ‘Voice of Customer’ (VOC). This is a
technique/strategy/tool used for identifying the customers’ needs.

Voice of Customer (VOC)

Voice of Customer is a product development tool that used by the design team to obtain a detailed set of
customer wants and needs (customer requirements) which are organized in a hierarchical structure and then
prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current or existing product alternatives or
solutions. In short, it is the process for capturing customers’ needs or requirements.

Benefits of VOC
The Voice of the Customer process is an important tool in product development because it provides:
 A detailed understanding of the customer’s requirements,
 A common language for a design team during the product development process,
 A key input for setting appropriate design specifications of a product or service.
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  A highly useful platform for innovation in product development
 Information for market research of a product
 A key input for developing Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and for preparing product design
specifications.

Procedure of carrying out VOC

 Determine who the customers/users of the product/services
 Determine what information should be gathered from the customers/users
 Determine how that information should be gathered
 Translate that information into product requirements and engineering specifications
 Establish Relative Importance of customer needs

A. Who are the customers?

Understanding who the customers/users of a product is very important issues because the product
specifications focus on needs/requirements of the customers/users. Customers of a product can be
identified as: End user of the product, those affecting the buying decision of the product, those
interacting with the product etc. Examples of smart phone customers are the phone users, seller of the
phones, mobile phone service providers etc.

B. What information should be gathered from the customers?

The type of information that should be gathered from the customer can be characterized based on
performance, time, cost, quality etc.
• Performance refers to the specific or intended function of a product.
• Time includes all the aspect of time involved in the product design process. A proper design should
be able to reduce the design process/cycle time. Examples of these times can be lead time, delivery
time, setup time, delays etc.
• Cost includes all the monetary aspects of the design process. The cost aspect determines the
customers buying decisions for the product. E.g. product costs, repair costs etc.
• Quality is a complex characteristic with many aspects. It can be defined as the features and
characteristic of a product that determine its ability to satisfy customer’s needs. These can be
product features or attributes or characteristics relating to the function of the product such as
reliability, availability, taste, effectiveness, freedom from defects etc.

C. How that information should be gathered?

The needs of the customers can be gathered by using tools/methods such as:
• Interviews. The design team can meet the potential customers of the product to identify the strength
and weakness of a product so as to examine if there is any need to upgrade it.
• Focus group. A focus group refers to a small sub-set of existing customers or potential customers.
A discussion with such groups can help to identify the merits and demerits of the product.
• Customer survey. A written questionnaire is one of the best ways of knowing the pubic opinions
for developing a new product or redesigning an existing product.
• Customer complaints. Complaints from customers can provide significant information for the
improvement for an existing product.
• “On the job” observations. This involves observing the environment where design will be used. It
is the best way to understand the end user. It is important for engineers to observe and not simply
rely on what others say.

D. Translating the information into product requirements and engineering specifications

The information gathered/collected from the customers should be translated into engineering
characteristics/specifications that will be used to satisfy the customer’s needs/requirements. This
means translating what the customer wants (voice of the customer) into how to achieve the wants
through engineering design (engineering specifications or voice of the engineer). For example, if a
customer wants a product to be strong, the engineering specification will be strength.
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E. Establish Relative Importance of Needs
The responses of the customer should be evaluated on a relative scale. The evaluation can be done
using a scale of 1 to 5, where,
o 1 may mean Not at all important
o 2 may mean Slightly important
o 3 may mean Important
o 4 may mean Fairly important
o 5 may mean Very important
Another option can be: 5 - strongly disagree, 4 – mildly disagree, 3 – neutral, 2 – mildly agree, 1 –
strongly agree
The customer responses with high score should be given a greater priority when designing a new
product or modify an existing product. It is very important when establishing the relative importance
of the customer needs to divide the needs into two groups,
o Hard constrains which are the needs that should be satisfied (must)
o Softer needs which are the needs that can be traded off against other customer needs (wants).

F. Constructing a Customer Survey Instrument

Following are some essential steps to prepare a survey document based on the views and feed-backs
from the customers.
1. Determine the purpose of the survey, its result and the how the result will be used.
2. Determine the type of possible data collection method such as face to face interview or by
questionnaire or some other way.
3. Determine what specific information is needed. Each question should have a clear goal. Also
the number of question should be optimized and kept at as minimum as possible.
4. Design the questions in such a way that they are unambiguous, unbiased, clear, brief and simple
to understand and to answer too. There are usually three basic type of questions that you can
ask the customer/user about the product:
 Attitude questions: how the customer thinks or feels about something,
 Knowledge questions: Questions asked to determine whether the customer know
the specifics about the product,
 Behavior questions they usually contain phrases like ‘how often’, ‘how much’, or
‘when’.
 Some tips for developing the questions are:
o Use simple language and vocabulary. Each question should have a specific
goal and focus directly on one specific topic.
o Questions may include “yes – no – do not know” or “strongly disagree –
mildly disagree – neutral – mildly agree – strongly agree”, etc.
o Open ended questions allow customers to express more explicitly,
o Arrange the question in such an order that it makes sense and provides
content to what you are trying to learn from the customer,
o Pretest the survey on a small sample before distributing the survey. It helps
to identify questions that were poorly built, misunderstood, whether the
rating scale was adequate and whether the questionnaire is too long
o Administer the survey: Proper care should be taken that the sample of the
survey should constitute a representative from all the key areas.
5. The table below shows some product characteristics/dimensions/criteria and their possible
questions/descriptions that you can ask the product customer/user in order to gather
information from the customer/user about a product.

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 GROUP ASSIGNMENT
1. Select a simple product
2. Provide a detail description of the selected product with illustrations
3. Prepare the customers’ survey instrument/questionnaire for the selected product using the “Voice of
Customer Survey” template
4. Analyse the information/responses of the data/information collected from the customer collected using
the “Analysis of Voice of Customer Survey” template

Sample Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

1. How often do you use our product?
2. Which features of our product do you use the most?
3. How easy was it to get started using our product?
4. What is your age range?
5. What is your gender?
6. What is your current employment status?
7. What motivates you to make a purchase?
8. How do you typically make purchasing decisions?
9. What is your preferred communication style?
10. What are your interests and hobbies?
11. On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with the product/service you received?
12. How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?
13. How satisfied are you with the level of customer service you received?
14. How well did our product/service meet your expectations?
15. What did you like least about our product/service?
16. Is there anything we could have done differently to improve your experience?
17. How likely are you to recommend our product/service to others?
18. How frequently do you expect to use our product/service in the future?
19. Do you have any concerns that may impact your ability to continue using our product/service?
20. Do you have any suggestions for improving our product/service?
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21. Would you purchase from us again?
22. How likely are you to continue doing business with us in the future?
23. Have you recommended our products/services to others?
24. How would you rate the speed at which your issue was resolved?
25. Was our support team able to fully address your question or concern?
26. How easy was it to use our product/service?
27. Was our product/service priced appropriately?

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 Bayero University Kano
Department of Mechanical Engineering
MEC 4201 – Innovative Design, 1st Semester ……………. Session

VOICE OF CUSTOMER SURVEY

Prepared by Group: ….... Title of Project: ……………………………………………………………………

Name of Product:…………… Date: …………..

Product Questions Relative

Feature/Customer Importance/Range of
Requirements Importance
1 2 3 4 5
Cost
Portable
Simple
Aesthetics
Safe
Durable
Ergonomics
Easy to operate
Others

KEY: 1 - Not at all important, 2 - Slightly important, 3 - Important, 4 - Fairly important, 5 - Very important OR
5 - strongly disagree, 4 – mildly disagree, 3 – neutral, 2 – mildly agree, 1 – strongly agree

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 ANALYSIS OF VOICE OF CUSTOMER SURVEY

The following tables below shows an example of the analysis of the responses of a Customer (user or respondent
or consumers) survey

Total number of form distributed = 50

Total number of returned form = 39

Table 1:
Range of Importance 1 2 3 4 5
Customer Requirement
Cost 3 5 1 6 24

From the total of 39 form returned by the respondent, 3,5,1,6 accordance to their range of importance, feel that
the product should be affordable which is very low, but 24 (61.54%) of the respondent feel that the product
should also be affordable which is high.

Table 2:
Range of Importance 1 2 3 4 5
Customer Requirement
Portable 2 4 5 8 20

From the result shown above in table 2: 2,4,5,8 were indicated by the respondent which are low range of
importance. While 20 (51.28%) of the respondent feel that the product should be portable.

Table 3:
Range of Importance 1 2 3 4 5
Customer Requirement
Simple 2 2 5 11 19

The result shown in table 3: 2, 2,5,11 were indicated by the respondent which are low range of importance. While
19 (48.72%) of the respondent feel that the product should be simple.

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 Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures the customer’s satisfaction level with a brand or product/service.
It can be thought of as a grade or percentage value representing how much the customers like your product.
It is the simplest way to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction, helping your company make crucial decisions
about its business.

Calculating Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT ranges from 1 to 10 (or 1% to 100%). A low score (1-6) indicates that you need to improve the product
or service quality, while a high score (8-10) implies that you are doing great.

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Formula

Once you have the score, you can feed it in the following formula to calculate your CSAT percentage:

CSAT = ( [Number of satisfied customers] / [Total number of responses] ) x 100

Example
For example, you ask 200 customers, “How satisfied are you with our products?” 90 customers answered
“satisfied,” and 50 answered “very satisfied.” The CSAT calculation would then become:

CSAT % = [90 + 50] / [200] x 100

Which is equal to:
CSAT % = 60%

What Is a Good Customer Satisfaction Score?

After you carried out your surveys, performed the analysis, and ended up with a CSAT value. But what does it
mean:
 A CSAT % above 80 is considered excellent.
 From 70% – 80% is considered good, but there is room for improvement.
 Any score less than 70 % should raise alarm bells for any company.