TABLE OF CONTENTS The bottom line for every company is not its short-term profitability but the value of its products in the eyes of customers, often called customer values. Short-term profitability reflects a company's recent history and past strengths, but without everlasting enthusiasm from its customers, a company may not last.
As a matter of fact, it is customers' opinions that determine a product's fate. Customers' opinions decide the price level, the size of the market, and the future trend of a product family. A product with high customer value often has increasing market share, increasing customer enthusiasm toward the product, word-of-mouth praises, a reasonable price, a healthy profit margin for the company that produces it, and increasing name recognition. Clearly, the ability to design and deliver service products that have high customer value is the key to success for service organizations.
There are plenty of books and articles that discuss issues related to customer value. The famous book Market Ownership by William Sherden (1994) has an excellent chapter on customer value. Bradley Gale's book Managing Customer Value (1994) also presents workable methods to survey and deploy customer value into product and service design. Many value engineering books and articles (Park 1999) provide detailed value definition and quantitative methods for value analysis and cost reduction. Quality function development (QFD) (Cohen 1988, 1995) is an excellent method developed in Japan that can be used to deploy customer wants into product design, including service product design. Using well-designed surveys is a...
