Page 104 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

Customer Value Management 85

3. Ask well-informed customers, including both yours and those of your
competitors, how you and your competitors perform on the various
quality attributes. Then for each attribute, divide the score of the
product or service you are studying by the scores of competitors’
products. This gives you the performance ratio on that attribute.
Multiply each ratio by the weight of that attribute. And add the results
to get an overall market-perceived quality score.
Table 5.1 is an example of a market-perceived quality profile for frozen
chicken (Gale 1994). In this table, the first column lists all the important non-
cost-related quality attributes in the chicken business: yellow bird, meat-to-
bone, and so on. The second column of this table lists the relative importance
rating for the attributes listed in column 1; the relative importance ratings
add up to 100 percent. For example, the yellow bird attribute accounts for
10 percent of relative importance; the fresh attribute accounts for 15 percent
of relative importance. These importance ratings are obtained from a specially
designed customer survey. The third column of this table lists the average
customer rating of our business’s product for each quality attribute. The
highest possible score is 10.0; the lowest possible score is 1.0. These scores
are also computed based on a specially designed customer survey. Column 4
of this table lists the average customer ratings of competitors’products for each
customer attribute. The fifth column lists the ratio of column 3 to column 4,
that is, the average customer rating of our product versus the average customer
rating of competitors’ products. Clearly, if this ratio is less than one, then it
means that in this quality attribute category, our product performs worse than
that of our average competitor; if this ratio is greater than one, then it means
that in this quality category, our product performs better than that of our
average competitor. The values in the last column, column 6, are obtained by
multiplying the value from column 5 (the ratio) times that in column 2 (the
relative importance score). Clearly, if all the ratios are equal to one, then it
means that our product is an average product in comparison with those of
competitors. Then the total score in column 6 will be equal to 100, and our
market-perceived quality score will be 100. The product with a market-
perceived quality score of larger than 100 is considered to be a competitive
product; the higher the score, the more competitive the product is.

The information used to compile the market-perceived quality profile, such as
that of Table 5.1, can also be obtained by conducting a special kind of customer
survey. A design of this kind of customer survey form is illustrated in Table 5.2.

The survey population should include the customers of our company, as
well as all consumers who purchase this kind of product or service,
including the customers of competitors. For example, if our company is