FRUGAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT: THINK BEYOND CONVENTIONAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT APPROACH TO “ENSURE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, BY FAMILIARIZING PRODUCT AND ITS PERFORMANCE”

Customer satisfaction is one of the key elements, to be successful in competitive business. The big challenge in front of every manufacturers, irrespective of Industry they are in is; how to satisfy customers. By and large customer satisfaction is mostly measured after the product or service is launched. Once we have customer feedbacks, its important to understand and categorize as Defects and Dissatisfactions. Ideally Defects shall be treated by improving the product, whereas Dissatisfaction items have to be treated carefully case-by-case. As in the case of Indian Automotive Industry, there are considerable amount of First time car buyers who might not be fully aware of Products' features. So its important that manufacturer deals it with specific care on how Product features are communicated to customers and how familiar are they with the same. This plays a vital role in deciding Customer satisfaction. Though many attempts have been made to capture customer voice during design phase and to consider in formation of specification through Quality Function Deployment, it mainly focuses on Defects only, not Dis-satisfaction which is purely driven by customer expectations. This paper attempts to understand and address Dissatisfaction items by Customer familiarization. A sample case of Passenger car Real world Fuel efficiency has been taken in to study and demonstrated that appropriate Customer familiarization brings sizeable results and improves customer satisfaction.