Five Minute Lean – Make Feedback Meaningful with Kano Analysis

This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable.

You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.

Make Feedback Meaningful with Kano Analysis

‘By discovering what delights our customers we can do more of it, by discovering what dissatisfies our customer we can fix it.’

Alternatively to the Net Promoter Score, we can ask the following two questions to discover what delights or dissatisfies our customer:

What did you love about your experience?
What did you hate about your experience?

This gives us enough information to be able to separate the answers into three sections:

Delighters (things customers love, or anything mentioned with an NPS score of eight or above),
Satisfiers (NPS scores between five and eight), and;
Dissatisfiers (things customers hate, or NPS scores of four or below).

Where traditional Kano analysis focuses on basic needs, expected needs and exciting needs of the customer, quantifying customer feedback using an actual number (NPS) and broadening the scope to include things the customer dislikes gives us much more room for improvement. The aim over time then becomes to increase the things that delight customers, continue doing the things that satisfy them and reduce the things that dissatisfy them.

lean kano analysis

Figure 1: Slightly different to traditional Kano analysis, separating the “Voice of the Customer” into Delighters, Satisfiers, and Dissatisfiers using the Net Promoter Score results can give us more information to improve. The aim becomes, over time, to increase Delighters, maintain or increase Satisfiers, and reduce Dissatisfiers.

You will probably notice that the answers we get in general will also fall into our three Lean “Customer Driven Metrics”, which are things that improve on Quality, Cost or Delivery times.

The next section focuses on the one most people would rather avoid – customer “Dissatisfiers” – and how we can actually use these to our advantage.

Selected chapters from the story within Five minute Lean:

[catlist name=”Five Minute Lean Parable”]

Check out these selected chapters from the teachings within Five Minute Lean:

[catlist name=”Five Minute Lean Excerpt” orderby=rand numberposts=20]