Integrating Kano model and grey–Markov chain to predict customer requirement states

This study aims at predicting the states transition of customer requirement to support product development department to generate products for future markets. Customer requirement analysis has long been recognized as one of the most crucial activities for the success of product development due to its significant impact on the downstream development activities. However, dynamic states transition of customer requirements has received less research attention. Most of researches only focus on static customer requirement analysis, which is not proper for developing competitive products in rapid changing market today. In order to manipulate this problem, a novel integrated approach for predicting customer requirement states is proposed. The novel approach integrates the strength of Kano model in customer requirement classification, the advantage of grey theory in trends prediction with fewer data and the merit of Markov chain in modeling local fluctuations of prediction. Finally, an application in prediction of customer requirement states for a mobile phone is provided to demonstrate the potential of the method.