1. Coordinate implementation of customer service strategies Lecture 2 Payman Shafiee

2. Paper: A tool for systematic assessment of customer needs in industrial markets Hannu Kärkkäinen is a researcher at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. He has participated in several extensive research projects dealing with the early-phase management of R&D and the systematic assessment of customer needs, and has conducted research involving close cooperation with a number of Finnish hi-tech companies from different industries. He is currently finalising his doctoral thesis in Management of Technology on the subject of customer needs assessment in business-to- business companies. Kalle Elfvengren is a researcher at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT), Finland. He teaches decision support systems and methods for technology management.

3. Advise on customer service needs Slides by Payman Shafiee Needs are key to understanding humans` Aspiration, Motivation, and Action Successful product development demands profound knowledge of customers and their needs product development projects based on carefully defined customer needs are more likely to succeed than those based on new technological opportunities

4. customer need and stepping up ! Assessing customer needs may not be sufficient:  Companies have to be able to understand thoroughly customers’ real needs and react quickly to their changing needs to succeed in the toughening business environment  Proactively assessing emerging customer needs.  they should be able to surpass customers’ expectations  Further the goal is not to be led by customers’ expressed needs only, but to amaze customers by anticipating and fulfilling their unarticulated needs.  To do this, a company must gain deep insights into potential classes of customer benefits The associated risk

5. The assessment of customer needs in Industrial markets Companies have found the systematic assessment of customer needs to be very important for their own business and success. Customer Needs (definition):  discrepancies between the existing and the desired situation that may or may not be recognised  Short term development  Long term development opportunities Problem with Users’ insights:  Users steeped in the present are unlikely to generate novel product concepts that conflict with the familiar

6. Characteristics of the industrial markets Industrial markets have several characteristics that differ significantly from consumer markets’ characteristics  industrial markets consist of all the individuals and organisations that acquire goods and services to be used in the production of other products or services that are sold, rented or supplied to oth ers.  Fewer and larger buyers  several buying influences  professional purchasing  derived demand  close supplier- customer relationships.  complexity, and development period Slides by Payman Shafiee

7. Needs assessment Who`s needs to consider: needs of all those persons and organisations that utilise the products, directly set requirements for the products or indirectly affect the requirements. Complexity in assessing needs due to relationship chain: including the various customer organisations that purchase the company’s product, the different persons and functions within the customer organisations affecting the product requirements, customers’ customers and the other parties forming a ‘chain’ towards the final end user or an individual consumer, and the stakeholders affecting the different parties in such customer chains

8. Needs assessment it is critical for the company to understand how its product will help the target customer to make money. Slides by Payman Shafiee

9. stakeholder theory stakeholder theory: a firm can only exist through the interactions, transactions and exchanges carried on with its stakeholders. Companies should identify, balance and fulfil the needs of their most important stakeholders to operate successfully in the long run. For this task, business management must understand and deal with the broad and complex network of expectations and demands that the stakeholders have brought into being  Where is the link to customers` needs? Slides by Payman Shafiee

10. Typical stakeholders The owners, management, customers, suppliers, competitors, government and environmental groups, and the internal customers  Internal customers are: i.e. sales and production, the needs of which should be clarified and carefully considered in product development

11. The chain of customers` customers... One trend or requirement affecting one remote party in the business chain can result in or affect the importance of several further requirements for other parties in the business chain. Each new requirement can, in turn, similarly cause further requirements for others, such requirements, finally, affecting the company itself.

12. The importance of customers` customers... According to our survey of 93 Finnish business-to- business companies, about 60% of the responding 70 companies considered the analysis of customers’ customers and other customers’ stakeholders as an important information source in the assessment of new customer needs, and one fifth of the companies considered it as a very important source. Slides by Payman Shafiee

13. Existing info. About customer needs There exists much customer need information in the different parts of organisations that develop new products, which is possessed by different personnel for instance in sales, marketing, R&D and after sales. Different people have different information about the objectives, needs and requirements of different stakeholders, customers, customers’ functions and companies involved in the business chain that affect the company’s product requirements. According to our experience in a number of Finnish companies, this information is rarely gathered, organised, analysed and documented very systematically and efficiently.* * Knowledge management strategies According to Adams, tools for successful new product development cannot be implemented successfully until the barriers hindering an organisation’s capabilities for effective learning about markets are understood

14. Tool developed for industrial customer need assessment The main objectives:  To describe illustratively and structure the business chains and the related need information, and to analyse systematically the impacts of trends, development needs and requirements concerning even the remote parties of business chains. Slides by Payman Shafiee

15. Utilising the developed tool The main objectives:  1 describing the business chain on the diagonal  The company, its customers and their most important stakeholders that can affect the customer needs of the company are clarified and organised on the diagonal, depending on the closeness of their relationship  2 filling the existing need-related information into the other cells of the table  The links between the parties organised on the diagonal are clarified and the information concerning them is gathered, selected and presented in the cells of the matrix and the fields outside the matrix. i.e. customer needs, requirements, problems, trends or development goals  3 tracing of new customer needs.

16. Utilising the developed tool The main objectives:  3 tracing of new customer needs.  the resulting needs and requirements are analysed successively from one party to another until the impacts on the actual company requirements are finally clarified Slides by Payman Shafiee

17. Industrial customer need assessment tool