Research Article

(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/qre.1277 Published online in Wiley Online Library

Improving Product Quality and Reliability with

Customer Experience Data
Aarnout Brombacher,a,{ Eva Hopma,a Ashwin Ittoo,b Yuan Lu,a*† Ilse Luyk,a
Laura Maruster,b Joël Ribeiro,c Ton Weijtersc and Hans Wortmannb
Advance technology development and wide use of the World Wide Web have made it possible for new product development
organizations to access multi-sources of data-related customer complaints. However, the number of customer plaints of
highly innovative consumer electronic products is still increasing; that is, product quality and reliability is at risk. This article
aims to understand why existing solutions from literature as well as from industry to deal with these increasingly complex
multiple data sources are not able to manage product quality and reliability. Three case studies in industry are discussed.
On the basis of the case study results, this article also identifies a new research agenda that is needed to improve product
quality and reliability under this circumstance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: customer experience; product quality and reliability; customer complaints; no fault founds; new product development

1. Introduction

M
any businesses in electronics industry are currently struggling to deliver products and services that meet customer expecta-
tions. From a technological perspective, almost anything is possible, but the difficulty for many companies is to create value
propositions that really add value to end users.1
Earlier research has already shown that the number of customer complaints and product returns is increasing for complex consumer
electronics.1 To deal with these customer complaints, product development organizations need to search proactively for customer experi-
ence data to understand where these customer complaints originate. Customer experience data refer to the customer experience related
to the products and the service levels. Subsequently, they should act accordingly in the development process on the basis of the information
generated from this experience data to deliver products that meet customer expectations.3
Two decades ago, the innovation in products was mainly in the field of mechanics and electronics. Products were created with an
often clear and straightforward function for the user, and the main reason to complain for a customer was when, because of the
breakdown of an electronic or mechanical part, the product was no longer able to fulfill this function. Handling this complaint in
the new product development (NPD) process was straightforward: carefully registering the number of defective components in
the field and taking appropriate action when necessary.4
Because of the increase of processing powers as predicted by Moore’s law, it has been technologically and economically feasible to
include multiple functions and thousands extra lines of software code in electronic products. As a result, these products have many
diverse functionalities and are often connected with other products and environments. In short, these products are increasingly com-
plex, resulting in an expensive number of customer complaints. Specifically, for current consumer electronics products, this observed
increasing number of complaints is particularly visible in the growing number of so-called no fault founds (NFF)—user complaints of
which the cause cannot be retrieved as technical malfunctioning but which relate to misalignment between product capabilities and
customer expectation.1,2,5–7 Earlier research has also shown that the percentage of NFF is in some cases higher than 50% of the total
customer complaints and still increasing. Therefore, relying on traditional customer experience data alone such as NFF data (service
center data) is insufficient to reduce the customer complaints for these complex products.8,9
Fortunately, continuously additional sources of customer experience data of these highly complex products are becoming avail-
able. First, customers have new and low threshold channels to share their opinion, experience, or complaint about an acquired—
or experienced—product or service, especially due to the wide use of Internet. When accessible, this information may have a strong

a
Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 5135600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
b
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, 9747, Groningen, The Netherlands
c
Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 5135600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
*Correspondence to: Yuan Lu, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 5135600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
†
E-mail: y.lu@tue.nl
{
The author list follows alphabetic order.

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 A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

influence not only on the audience—which can be potential customers—but also on the development organizations. Internet forums,
social networks, blogs, and others are good examples that may work as an immediate kind of word of mouth, affecting market trends
and companies goodwill.1,2 Furthermore, more complex NPD processes due to the growing product complexity10 and increasing
globalization11 lead to other sources of customer experience data. These data are collected by different parties involved in the
NPD, such as local service companies in different geographies, partners in a joint go-to market program, and so forth. In the mean
time, the increasing globalization makes NPD operation even more complex. Therefore, NPDs are actively searching for internal
and external resources,11 ranging from cheaper production resources to knowledge and expertise centered power houses.12 Such
a paradigm shift implies that important and large volumes of customer experience data are collected outside the boundaries of these
NPD companies. Among others, data from helpdesk, trade, and test during NPD are collected to enable the producers to have good
insight about their products and market conditions in the field. Lastly, it is increasingly feasible for the complex and often networked
products to generate real-time customer experience data, often even more than required (e.g. www.UXsuite.com). Thus, there are
many more sources of customer experience data available than we can imagine, and these data are piling up. Literature suggests that
these customer experience data are potentially useful to improve customer satisfaction.1,2,13
The previous discussion describes a contradictory phenomenon. On the one hand, customer complaints are increasing and so are
the needs to improve product Q&R based on customer experience data. On the other hand, there are plenty of customer experience
data that can be acted upon. Subsequently, the central research question that this article is interested in is
Why this large volume of data does not help companies to improve product Q&R in their new product development (NPD)?
This article explores the above problem area via three case studies. One case study explores the field, whereas the other two
of these case studies attempt to solve the above problem for a particular instance in practice. This article as a whole follows a
design methodology;14 that is, reflection on the case studies is presented in a discussion section, leading to generalized asser-
tions. Of course much more work is needed to explore the field and corroborate the initial findings. Therefore, the article con-
cludes with proposing a research agenda to deal with the design challenges so that we can move from the ad hoc and local solutions
to a more systematic and integrated approach to support the development of high quality products and services by using customer
feedback data.
This article is organized as follows. In Section 2, a literature review is conducted to analyze existing methods and tools and their
strengths and limitations when dealing with the identified research challenges. The three case studies are presented in Section 3 to
demonstrate the strength and limitation of these methods and tools when applying them in real-life industrial problems. Section 4
provides a discussion and generalization of the results. On the basis of these results, a research agenda is proposed in Section 4.
Conclusions are presented in Section 5, the final section.

2. Literature review
As discussed in Section 1, it is important for the product development organizations to gain understanding on large amount of
customer experience data to improve customer satisfaction and reduce customer complaints. In the knowledge management litera-
ture, a distinction is made between data, information, and knowledge. Davenport and Prusak provide the following distinction
between data, information, and knowledge:15
“Data: A set of discrete, objective facts about events.
Information: A message, usually in the form of a document or an audible or visible communication.
Knowledge: A fluid mix of framed experiences, values, contextual information, and expert insights that provides a framework for
evaluation and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knower’s.”
It is also interesting to introduce the data–information–knowledge–wisdom hierarchy16,17 here. The data–information–knowledge–
wisdom hierarchy is often referred to variously as the “knowledge hierarchy,” the “information hierarchy,” and the “knowledge pyra-
mid’ in the information and knowledge literature. Despite the large number of different definitions of data, information, knowledge,
and wisdom, the implicit assumption is that data can be used to create information; information can be used to create knowledge,
and knowledge can be used to create wisdom. Wisdom is a neglected concept and its definition is still debatable.18
In this article, we will focus on data, information, and knowledge and on the processes necessary to obtain information from data
and knowledge from information. Furthermore, to really improve product performance, product development organizations need to
act accordingly. According to Dalkir, knowledge should follow the following life cycle:19 (i) knowledge capture and/or creation, as
knowledge management typically suggests (ii) knowledge sharing and dissemination and (iii) knowledge acquisition and application.
Therefore, it is useful to review methods and tools that can be applied to transform customer experience data into information and
knowledge and to identify methods and tools that support the knowledge management (KM) life cycle.
In the Q&R literature, there are several methods and tools proposed to capture and analyze customer experience data for the
development organizations.1,7 These methods and tools provide a structure to derive useful information from these customer experi-
ence data to improve product Q&R performance in NPD. However, the execution of these methods and tools with the increasing com-
plex customer experience data is very time consuming as they can work only with structured data, and the results depend also very
much on data quality.13 Because all consumer experience data are collected for the interest of individual functional departments, they
are often free text based, they are recorded in different languages, they do not follow the same structure (heterogeneousness), and

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A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

they are often lacking structure (see Table I). It becomes an increasing challenge for the development organizations to combine these
data into structured information and knowledge to act upon. Therefore, methods and tools in the field of natural language processing
and knowledge discovery are particularly relevant for this literature review. Furthermore, it is important to understand what can
hinder development organizations when using these methods and tools to share information and knowledge.

2.1. Natural language processing

It is noticeable that natural language (free text) is the most common unstructured data format among the heterogeneous customer
experience data such as Helpdesk and Internet forums. Unstructured data may be meaningful to humans, but it is usually too large as
a corpus of data to be manageable for humans.
In its original form, textual data cannot be automatically analyzed to support Enterprise Intelligence activities, for example, pertaining
to product quality and customer satisfaction in the field of Q&R. Therefore, to identify and extract meaningful information from such large
volumes of unstructured texts, they first have to be converted into a structured representation, more amenable to automated analyses.
This subsection briefly introduces various techniques for deriving structured representations from unstructured texts and discovering
meaningful information from the structured representations. It serves as the background for the first case study.
Identifying and extracting relevant terms/concepts from texts is the most fundamental step to convert these texts into a more
structured format. In many cases, however, since customer experience texts are spontaneously created, they are rife with extraneous
(noisy) contents. These are discarded by standard data-cleaning and preprocessing, such as dropping irrelevant symbols (“^”) or
words that are not content-bearing (e.g. “the,” “it”).
After the data have been cleaned and preprocessed, term extraction (TE) approaches can be applied. TE techniques can be classi-
fied into three major groups. Linguistic approaches21 identify terms in texts based on their linguistic and syntactic properties, such as
part of speech, for example, nouns, adjectives and/or prepositions. Statistical approaches identify terms based on statistical evidence
gathered from the document corpus. The underlying principle of statistical TE algorithms is that the frequency of a lexical expression
(e.g. word) indicates whether it designates an important concept or not. One of the most popular statistical TE technique is the term
frequency inverse document frequency22), which assigns a score to terms, indicative of their relevancy and importance. To extract
multi-word terms, a class of statistical techniques, known as Lexical Association Measures (LAM), is usually used. Examples of LAMs
include mutual information, chi-square and log-likelihood.23,24 The last category of TE approaches is hybrid algorithms, incorporating
both linguistics and statistical techniques. State-of-the-art hybrid TE techniques are the CNC method25 for identifying terms from eye
pathology reports, the Textractor algorithm26 for TE from customer complaint and product repair texts, and the approach of Piao
et al.27, which detected terms from court (judiciary) documents.
After deriving a structure (i.e. terms) from the previously unstructured texts, the next step is to identify meaningful information
segments from the structured representations. This can be achieved using several types of data-mining techniques, such as decision
trees, Naïve–Bayes classifier, Support Vector Machines (SVM), association rule mining, and clustering.28
In the domain of Q&R and related disciplines, Naïve–Bayes and SVM have been commonly used for automatic e-mail classification
at helpdesk and call centers.29,30 Hori et al.31 relied on association rule mining to discover field quality problems from incident reports.
Case-based reasoning has been used for assisting helpdesk operators.32 Lazarov and Shoval33 presented a rule-based system for
assigning service faults to technicians. Clustering techniques have been most extensively applied for activities pertaining to customer
relationship management. For example, Yang and Dia34 automatically discovered subgroups (clusters) of users for targeted advertis-
ing, whereas Hosseini et al.35 applied clustering algorithms for investigating customer loyalty.

2.2. Knowledge discovery

The knowledge discovery concept can be defined as the process of searching much data for nontrivial patterns (i.e. knowledge).
Knowledge discovery subdomains such as data mining, process mining, or online analytic processing (OLAP), have been exhaus-
tively studied during the last decade, offering nowadays a vast amount of techniques that can be used in almost every business
context.36–38 Clustering, classification, and association are the data mining main techniques, which typically generate business
rules as knowledge. An application example on field feedback data sources can be found in (Lee and Hu, 2004)39 and
(Min et al., 2002).40 Other data mining-related techniques such as text mining, time series analysis, or graph mining can work with
specific data types, typically discovering patterns as knowledge. An application of text mining techniques over customer service
databases can be found in (Ittoo et al., 2010).26 Process discovery, conformance checking, and performance analysis are the
process mining main techniques, which can be applied on event logs to extract knowledge about processes.41,42 An example
of process mining applicability on event-based customer experience data sets can be found in (Koca et al., 2008).7 OLAP

Table I. Properties of diverse customer field feedback data sources (extracted from Project Plan data fusion project20)
Different sources of customer experience data Properties
Service center Numeric, categorical
Helpdesk Freetext
Internet Freetext
Test Freetext, numerical, categorical
Trade Freetext

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 A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

techniques consist basically on business reporting, where the data are structured and presented in multidimensional layers. Here
the knowledge is intuitively obtained from the manual exploration of different data perspectives. An application of OLAP in cus-
tomer service support can be found in (Hui and Jha, 2000).43 Combining OLAP and data mining, OLAP mining can also be con-
sidered to extract knowledge from multidimensional data.44
Although knowledge discovery techniques are easily applicable in any business context according to the literature, there are some
issues related to customer experience data that make the application more difficult and complex. The heterogeneous and autono-
mous character of the customer experience databases is the major challenge for knowledge discovery. The reliability of the data is,
as well, a critical issue. Unstructured, incoherent, and noisy data may lead to misadjusted results. It implies that unstructured customer
experience data needs to be transformed to structured information before the knowledge discovery.

2.3. Information processing in NPD

As mentioned in Section 1, the high level of expertise and specialization in the NPD process leads to compartmentalization and results
in metaphorical “walls” between the departments, which entangle the data and information sharing process across functions.45
Cooper46 recognizes this problem. He discusses the “hands-off” phenomenon: as one function passes the project on to the next
departments, they just “throw it over the wall.”
In addition, it is also hard to communicate between the different functional departments, because they use different types of data
and information and distinctive jargon, the so-called representational gaps.47 Moreover, cross-functional teams have multiple, hetero-
geneous information needs. Thus, the boundaries among team members may be seen as an extra constraint for knowledge discovery,
especially over heterogeneous databases. Meyer and Schwager3 recognized this problem: departments within companies have an
isolated view on the value of customer experience data and information that is available—there is no connection to the departments
preceding or following, which causes the loss of valuable decision support data and information
There are methods and tools available to detect the absence or deficiency of data and information flows in NPD—for example the
Maturity Index on Reliability—but they are highly analytic. These models analyze data and information flows in business processes,
show if decision support information reaches particular stages in the development process and whether the company anticipates
on that information or not, but they do not tell what to do if this is not the case and do not provide a solution how to improve
the information flow consequently. It has been also recognized that most organizations do not have a conscious process-oriented
approach for sharing, distributing and exploiting data and information as decision support information in the development
process.48,49 Kim and Kang50 (2008) said that managing NPD is gradually shifting more toward raising the awareness of different roles
and contributions in the product creation. It is possible that people do not see the value of sharing the product-related data and infor-
mation (like customer experience data) back and forward between departments, which suggest that the problem in data and infor-
mation distribution is a motivational one.
In short, the departmental wall, the representational gaps among multifunctional departments, their different information needs,
the lack of motivation, and process oriented approach may contribute to the lack of sharing, distributing and exploitation of the
customer experience data. A process oriented thinking and organization is therefore more desired.

3. Case studies
From Sections 1 and 2, it can be concluded that despite the availability of large amount of customer experience data and the increas-
ing efforts in dealing with these data in the NPD, these data are not properly approached and used in the NPD.
Namely, the needed transformations from data to knowledge are insufficiently or incompletely performed in NPD projects. The
data do not reach and used by the developer in time or at all. The IOP IPCR data fusion project financed by the Dutch Ministry of
Economic Affairs, a joint research effort between universities and industrial partners, are taking up this research challenge for the
development organization to improve consumer satisfaction.51 This article reports the first results of the data fusion project. Three
case studies were conducted by three PhD students with information system, knowledge management and industrial design back-
ground to provide answers to the following research questions:
• How unstructured (free text customer experience) data can be transformed into structured data?
• How structured (customer experience) data can generate useful information for the NPD?
• Why customer experience data are not yet actively shared and used in NPD despite the large amount of available data and
continuous efforts in learning from these data in the product development organization?
By performing three case studies in industrial companies, we want to illustrate to what extent existing solutions from literature can
solve the research problem and what new solutions are needed. From the analysis of case study results, we aim to derive the research
agenda that is needed to deal with the research challenges. Details of each case study are reported in the next subsections.

3.1. Case study methodology

For performing this research, we followed the methodology steps, as described by Baxter&Jack52 (who base their work on Yin,53
Stake54 and Miles and Hubermann55).

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For the purpose of the research, the case study was found the most suitable first approach. Our intention is to obtain a clear picture
concerning customer data, the processes involving customer data, and the tools used to process the data within the context of the
organization. The type of the case study is exploratory multiple-case studies approach, which enable us to compare the cases and to
propose hypotheses as further steps in a research agenda.
To increase the generalizability of our findings, we applied a strategy for selecting cases, namely, selecting the critical case.56
Critical cases are used to achieve information that permits logical deduction of the type “if this is (not) valid for this case, then it
applies to all (no) cases.”
In this realm, we identified the most “likely cases” of companies. These companies should comply with the following selection
criteria:
1. it is a well-known manufacturing company
2. the company is very much customer oriented, interested in after-sale quality service
3. the company is exhibiting the problem “too many customer complaints, how to use efficiently/effectively these data?”
4. the company attempted several existing solutions to solve the problem, to decrease customer complaints
Within each selected case, the following aspects were addressed:
1. the investigation of data (and/or process) aspects, pertaining to customer complaints (data description, purpose of data)
2. the inventory of previous solution(s) aimed to solve the problem “too many customer complaints, how to use efficiently/effectively
these data?”
3. the description of new solution(s) proposed by the research team, to decrease customer complaints.
As was said already, each company attempted to find a solution to the problem “there are too many customer complaints, how to use
efficiently/effectively these data?.” The solution proposed in each case was aimed to decrease customer complaints.” In methodological
terms, the general proposition that each case should verify is “in the present case, the proposed (new) solution helps decreasing customer
complaints.”
Per case study, an analysis is performed to identify different aspects of the problem stated above, which are exhibited before and
after the application of the (new) solution.
The first two case studies were following the regulative cycle used in (applied) design sciences, namely, problem analysis, solution
design, and implementation.57 In both cases, a new system aimed to solve the problem was implemented and tested. The third case
consisted of an empirical study, following an exploratory approach, where data were collected via interviews. Therefore, this third case
study has a slightly different structure then the other two cases. The data collection aspects are provided further in the description of
each case.

3.2. Case 1: text classification

Company A where this case study was performed fulfilled the selection criteria. It is a large global company operating in the healthcare
industry. It is very much customer oriented, they have many (commercial) systems available to address complex customer satisfaction
issues.

3.2.1. Case 1: description and purpose of existing corporate data

Service engineers worldwide record the repairs and maintenance actions that they perform in a job-sheet database. This database
also contains the customer complaints that initiated the repair/maintenance (service) procedures. A job-sheet record consists of both
structured (e.g. categorical, numeric) and unstructured (e.g. text) fields for storing different types of data such as caller-ids, dates and
textual descriptions of repair actions and customer complaints.
Currently, the job-sheets data are exploited only by the customer service department. Data analysts manually search for key terms
in the job-sheets’ textual contents to classify them into different categories. The categorized job sheets are then used to generate
management reports, describing the contribution of the various service actions to the total maintenance cost and product reliability.
Subsequently, this information is exploited to devise appropriate remedial measures for improving product development and servic-
ing. It is also analyzed to investigate causes of customer complaints.
The major obstacle hindering the efficient usage of the job-sheets data is the difficulty involved in examining its unstructured
textual contents. The current approach of manual job-sheet classification is laborious and error-prone because the texts are noisy,
ungrammatical, and in different languages. Manual analysis is also inaccurate and subjective and prevents the reuse of previously
acquired information/knowledge.

3.2.2. Case 1: the solution implemented within case study

The new solution proposed in this case study automatically analyzes the job-sheets’ textual contents to derive key terms and classifies
them into categories on the basis of the key terms. An overview of the new approach adopted to realize the solution is shown
in Figure 1.
For the case study, we first needed to preprocess the job-sheets data. Therefore, we started by implementing a converter for
converting the data from its original proprietary format to platform-independent text files. Then, together with domain experts, we

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 A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

Figure 1. Text classification framework

selected which fields to consider in our analyses. Next, we discarded extraneous (noisy) contents from the job-sheets’ textual con-
tents. These included redundant strings (e.g. “General remarks”), stop words (e.g. “a”), and irrelevant symbols (“?”). The texts in our
data were expressed in the major European and Asian languages. We implemented a language detection algorithm to automatically
detect these languages and selected only those written in English. We then detected and corrected typographical errors by imple-
menting an automatic spellchecker. Finally, we performed basic linguistic processing by segmenting the texts into sentences, splitting
the sentences into tokens, and determining the tokens’ part of speech (e.g. verbs, nouns, adjectives).
After the preprocessing phase, we used sophisticated linguistic and statistical processing to extract relevant terms from the job-
sheets’ texts. This was achieved by the Textractor algorithm, described in details in (Ittoo et al.).26
We then implemented a classifier algorithm that learned relationships between terms and categories from a collection of preclassified
job sheets. We investigated different models to represent these relationships, including decision trees, probabilistic (Naïve–Bayes), and a
simple rule-based classifier.
Given a new job sheet, our classifier identifies key terms from its textual contents using the Textractor algorithm. It then consults
the appropriate classifier model to infer possible categories for the job sheet and suggests the top-10 likeliest categories. Data
analysts can decide whether to follow the classifier’s recommendations or their own judgments.

3.2.3. Case 1: data analysis. The generic problem set in the beginning of the article “too many customer complaints, how to use
efficiently/effectively these data?” was translated in this first case study in two specific subproblems, namely,
1. Data are not user-friendly enough to be used for (internal) exploitation/queries within the service department
2. Data are not used outside the service department
The proposed solution aimed to solve the above-mentioned subproblems.
We checked the effects of the new solution provided by our research team. Although the new solution has solved (partially) the
two subproblems, there were still issues which were not addressed, see Table II.

3.2.4. Case 1: case conclusion. Our proposed new solution has been successfully implemented and is currently being used at com-
pany A. It identifies relevant terms from the unstructured textual contents of job sheets, facilitating their representation in a more
structured format. It then accurately classifies incoming job-sheets into categories by examining their textual contents. However,
when the source and the quality of the data cannot be tracked back, there is lack of motivation for other departments to use such
data. This solution is then insufficient to deal with the research challenge mentioned earlier.

3.3. Case 2: knowledge discovery in customer experience databases of multimedia products

Company B, a large global company that designs and manufactures highly exclusive quality electronic products, has the customer
satisfaction as one of the main performance indicators.
They have been putting many efforts in acquiring the customer feedback related to their latest systems and concepts, but their
insight about the customer satisfaction is not yet totally comprehensive. Although there is a large volume of customer experience
data in their customer service databases, it is difficult to monitor processes like the handling of customer complaints. This happens
due to data heterogeneousness, that is, the data are distributed over different databases and may be represented by different

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Table II. Case 1 (job-sheet classification solution)

Specific problem (requirements) Solution applied
Before the application of new 1. Data not user-friendly for exploitation/queries Transforming unstructured data into
solution structured data
2. Data not used outside service department Classifying data
3. Data not used in NPD (potential usage) Solution to be found
After the application of new 1. Increased user-friendliness for exploitation/queries Problem (partially) solved
solution 2. System still not effective to track back the source of Solution to be found
complaints
3. Data not used in NPD (potential usage) Solution to be found

notations. Moreover, these databases are being used as independent operational systems, which mean that information retrieval is
not always possible.
The main goal of this case study is the data integration of the customer experience data. Then, because these data sources contain
more than operation information, knowledge discovery techniques such as the ones that can be found in OLAP and Data Mining tools
can be applied to get insight about the customer satisfaction. Because of the similarities of this case and a Data Warehousing project,
this case study follows the Kimball’s approach.58 As outcome of this study, a system is designed and deployed in which data are
retrieved from the distributed data sources, cleaned and transformed in such a way that knowledge discovery techniques can be
applied, and finally integrated into a new data repository.

3.3.1. Case 2: description and purpose of existing corporate data. This case study aims a new solution toward the discovery of nontri-
vial knowledge from the customer service databases. Typical examples of their customer service cases are product flaws that need to
be fixed, support service requests, or new functionality desires. The business managers want to know what they can learn from the
(integration of) customer experience data in relation to their service quality, how they can improve their customer service process
accordingly, and consequently reach a higher level of customer satisfaction.
The company’s customer experience databases are fed by multiple sources such as call centers, R&D, dealers, or the Internet. The
collected data are typically unstructured (i.e. free text) but, at early stages of the service process, a team of specialized employees
classifies the cases according to specific categories. Depending on the case, the data are used to characterize complaints or requests,
which solution—or answer—can either be known or unknown. Known solutions are maintained in a knowledge management system
that relies on a dedicated relational database. Unknown cases are reported to service teams to be analyzed and solved. These teams
are supported by two heterogeneous relational databases, one for complaint management and the other for supporting the solution
development process.
The time period that each customer service case needs to be solved (i.e. from the complaint or request arrival until its solution or
answer release) is defined as solution time. This is considered the main performance measure for which the company wants to
develop a system for complaint monitoring. Such a system needs to be able to track the customer complaints along their life cycle,
providing better insight about the complaint handling process.
In the end, through better process performance analysis, the company will be able to improve its customer service and, conse-
quently, the customer satisfaction.

3.3.2. Case 2: solution implemented within the case study. Although the solution time of a complaint can be simply defined by the
time difference of when the complaint is raised and its solution is given, the procedure for computing the solution times is not as
simple as it initially seems. Once the complaints follow four different stages along their life cycle, one needs to be able to identify
on each stage a specific complaint actually is. These stages are simply identified as discovery, analysis, resolution, and release. Let
us assume that a complaint may always skip one or more stages. This happens because, for instance, a former solution may solve
a recent complaint. Furthermore, other exceptional behaviors, such as cases with one missing stage, should be considered as well.
Moreover, even when a complete complaint (with all of its four stages) is successfully retrieved, there may be unknown or incoherent
information.
An analysis was performed to check whether the identified databases contain sufficient information about the complaints and
their handling service. However, combining these heterogeneous databases requires an effective data integration process. Missing
information, especially foreign keys (i.e. the references that enable the relation of two different data tables), is identified as the main
issue for this process. Furthermore, data normalization and transformation are also necessary to standardize or derive relevant infor-
mation. The complaint life cycle information is distributed over two different databases (seven data tables). The percentage of missing
(or null) information for each attribute varies up to 77%.
Our proposed solution consists on a three-step data integration process: data extraction, transformation, and integration. First, the
complaint life cycle data are extracted from the data sources to a staging area. Then, transformation services are applied to prepare
the data to be analyzed according the users requirements. This means that the complaint data need to be retrieved from the different
data tables. Then, linking the different stage data, it seems possible to build the complaint case along the different stages. Eventually,
data cleaning and normalization tasks are applied to treat incoherent information. Finally, the solution time can be easily calculated.
The complaint case is ready to be integrated into a knowledge base.

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 A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

Result analysis is achieved through OLAP techniques. The data integration process was designed in such a way that it is possible to
analyze each complaint case through the combination of five different dimensions. Thus, it is possible to evaluate the customer
service by either quantity (number of complaints) or quality (complaint solution time). Furthermore, different dimensions may be
combined to constraint the analysis. As example, possible answers are the average of solution times for every complaint about a
specific product family or the evolution of the total amount of high-priority complaints along the time. Time, product, priority, com-
plaint type, and measurement type are possible dimensions that can be combined with two measurements: number of complaints
and complaint solution time.

3.3.3. Case 2: data analysis. The generic problem set in the beginning of the article “too many customer complaints, how to use
efficiently/effectively these data?” was translated into “time to solution is difficult to be retrieved”
We checked the effects of the new solution provided by our research team. In Table III, the specific problems exhibited before and
after the application of the solution are shown.

3.3.4. Case 2: case conclusion. This case study focused on the design and development of a system capable of performing data
integration and knowledge discovery. It was demonstrated that through combining customer experience data and information, it
is possible to obtain a better overview about customer service processes. This actionable knowledge may be used at both strategic
and operational level. Once the system’s knowledge base relies in coherent and integrated data, this new knowledge source out-
stands its own data sources in terms of data trustiness and readiness. So far, business-reporting techniques were applied to explore
the business process information through different perspectives. However, other issues such as improving the detection of bottle-
necks and using the data in NPD projects are not solved.

3.4. Case 3: data and information distribution in the NPD process

Although customer experience data are made available continuously, the number of customer complaints is increasing. A possible
explanation is that the customer data and information are not reaching the developers. We conducted an explorative case study
at a large global company in the healthcare industry to examine whether and why these data are not actively shared among the
different departments in the NPD process. Although this study was not focused solely on customer experience data and was
referring to the broader perspective of data and information sharing and distribution in the NPD process, it complies with our
selection criteria.

3.4.1. Case 3: case methodology and data analysis

Cross-sectional interviews were carried out to discover the issues in the current data and information distribution the NPD process.
The interviews were open and semistructured and did not have a predetermined list of questions to enable the interviewees to talk
freely about how available data and information were actually used in their part of the NPD process (including habitual practices in
the work environment). The interviews contained one starting question and six topics to guide the rest of the conversation. This
inductive approach allowed alternative explanations to (better) understand the nature of the issues in the data and information
distribution in the NPD process during the interview itself.59 The interaction between the researcher and the interviewees was non-
directive: the interviewee’s perception of the subject matter guided the interview.
This interviewing technique enabled a flexible and responsive interaction between the researcher and the subjects, which
provided us with rich input concerning the subject matter and allowed us to answer the why question as stated above.
The different departments within the business unit were used point of departure to carefully select the interviewees—to make
sure all parties that are involved in the product development process were represented by at least two members. The people were
invited by e-mail for the 1-h interview. We conducted 17 interviews in total spread over two working weeks in March 2009. The inter-
views were digitally recorded and transcribed afterward. Valuable quotes were derived from the transcriptions during the review and
evaluation of the interviews. The quotes were structured into different categories. To prevent misinterpretation, the categories were
verified during a focus group in which two employees of the business unit cardiovascular (who were not interviewed during the data
gathering phase) participated. The participants were asked to classify more than 50 quotes from the interviews into categories.

Table III. Case 2 (knowledge discovery in customer experience databases)

Specific problem (requirements) Solution(s) applied

Before the application of
new solution
After the application of
new solution
1. Time to solution difficult to retrieve Data integration process
2. Time to solution difficult to analyze Knowledge discovery techniques
1. Evaluating customer services by quality and quantity Problem partially solved
(calculate time to solution)
2. System still not effective to detect the source of long Solution to be found (process mining)
throughput times
3. Data not used in NPD (potential usage) Solution to be found (knowledge
management)

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A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

Although the categories did not correspond literally, the underlying thoughts were similar—which confirmed that the interpretation
and abstraction of the quotes were intersubjective. Subsequently, the collections of categories that shared their underlying idea were
isolated into clusters.

3.4.2. Case 3: case results and analysis. The analysis of the data shows that there are two important issues concerning data and infor-
mation distribution in the NPD process: culture and insight. Culture refers to the way people deal with data and information—their
attitude and mentality toward the implementation of decision support data and information in their work. Insight applies to the way
that data and information is presented in terms of overview and transparency.
There is a strong division in the culture area: there is a group of people that sees opportunities and takes initiatives in the
sharing of data and information as decision-making support in the NPD process. They know that particular data and information
are present in the business unit and are conscious of the role of that data and information in their work and the work of others.
However, more importantly, there is also a group that does not actively use data and information that is available in the company
for their role in the NPD process because they do not see the value of doing so. We found two reasons for this. First, most people of
this group are biased. They claim that they do not need the data and information because they believe it is not necessary or
beneficially for their work or because they operate on (often long-term) experience and intuition. Second, some people refuse
to use the data and information because they distrust the data and information or because they simply do not know that the data
and information are available. As an indication, if they cannot find the data and information, they assume it is not there.
The issues in the way that decision support data and information are presented in the business unit can be divided in three topics.
First, product-related data and information are strongly separated. Departments operate individually and are isolated from others.
Metaphorical walls disconnect the flow of data and information. Next to this, there is too much data and information widespread
over the Business Unit. It is not clear who is responsible for the sharing of which data and information. Finally, the data and informa-
tion are unstructured. It is not easy accessible and mainly based on personal contact. The interview results are visualized below
(Figure 2).
The two phenomena, culture and insight, seem to be interdependent. For example, the fact that searching product-related
data and information is very time consuming (because the data and information are widespread, not easy accessible and based
on personal contact) might be the reason that people refuse to look for valuable data and information as input for their job.
Summarizing the results, the generic problem set in the beginning of the article “too many customer complaints, how to use
efficiently/effectively these data?” was translated into “Why customer experience data are not yet actively shared and used in NPD
despite the large amount of available data and continuous efforts in learning from these data in the product development
organization.”
The reformulation of the generic problem and the response provided by our research team are shown in Table IV.

3.4.3. Case 3: case conclusion. From this explorative case study, we can conclude that the fact that customer experience data are not
actively shared as decision support among the different departments in the NPD process might have two reasons. First, because most
people do not see the value of implementing data and information as decisions support in their work (culture) and, second, because
some have a limited perceived availability of data and information in the company (insight). Consequently, crucial product-related
data and information (like customer experience data) do not reach the developer in time or not at all, which then again might lead
to an increasing number of customer complaints and product returns—which is also recognized by Den Ouden (2006).1

Figure 2. Visualization of interview results

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 A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

Table IV. Case 3 (data and information distribution)

Before the application of new
solution
After the investigation
Specific problem (requirements) Solution(s) applied
1. Data are not shared across departments Investigating why (exploratory)
1. Change of culture Solution to be found
2. Facilitate insights into data, information, knowledge Solution to be found

4. Discussion
As discussed earlier, case 1 demonstrated the usefulness of applying data handling techniques to transform free text customer
experience data to useful information in the NPD. However, the results will not lead to a development of better products or
services yet. This is because at the moment the job-sheets data contain only data collected by service center. The information
generated does not completely represent the performance of the products and services.8 On the other hand, the data are only
analyzed from a single departmental perspective, and it is not clear to other departments that such information could be also
potentially beneficial for them.
Case 2 demonstrated the benefits of combining different customer experience data sources in obtaining knowledge related to
service quality. However, only structured data were analyzed. The analysis was also performed from one single departmental perspec-
tive. The usefulness of such knowledge to other departments is not communicated and made known.
Case 3 emphasizes that the culture and the behavior of employees determine to a high extent whether data and information are
actually spread and shared as decision support in the NPD process. However, having highly motivated employees who could actively
share and use the information alone without effective IT solutions, which help convert raw data to knowledge continuously, will not
help the development organizations developing better products and services. This is also recognized by other scholars. Pitt and
MacVaugh60 emphasized that computer-enabled information systems (databases) are necessary in solving the problem but not
sufficient: knowledge management in NPD requires a holistic approach, integral to the organization “working with not against the
grain of its technical, social and cultural processes.” After all, the success of NPD in which projects are ran parallel rests largely on
the ability of an organization to share timely data and information among members of a cross-functional development team.61
The three cases were selected on the basis of exhibiting the same problem, namely, “how to manage efficiently and effectively
increasing customer complaints data?” The solution provided within each case solved partially the problem (cases 1 and 2) or gave
indications toward a possible solution (case 3).
The selected cases were the critical ones, in the sense that each company demonstrated to spend many efforts toward increasing
customer satisfaction by implementing eventual solutions. The chosen cases are also within large companies, which can afford invest-
ments in this direction.
On the basis of these case findings, we advocate that proposed solutions only partially solved the problem. We can generalize
these findings by applying the logical deduction “if the applied new solutions only partially solve the problem based on these critical
cases, then it is likely to apply to all cases.”
Corroborating this with the results of the literature, we can claim that our results are generalizable.
In Table V, the overview of case study results is shown. The column “Specific problem (requirements)” represents the existing
specific problem, which was identified by the companies to be critical for decreasing customer complaints. The column “High
level requirements” represents the aggregations of specific problems (or requirements) to a higher level, or in other words,
specific problems have been grouped in clusters of higher level requirements.
Summarizing, the following groups of high-level requirements, which need to be covered in an integrated approach, emerged:
1. Assuring user-friendliness of information systems
2. Access of data across departments
3. Evaluating customer service/quality management
4. Effective data enrichment, knowledge extraction
5. Motivation of access of data across departments
6. Awareness of access of data across departments
Corroborating these findings with the literature performed earlier, we can conclude that indeed, an integrated approach is needed.
Therefore, we propose to follow the research agenda presented below to deal with the unstructured and free text based customer
experience data.

• Transforming unstructured and free text data into information

• Transforming information into knowledge
• Simulating and motivating knowledge management
Without a proper transformation of the unstructured data, it is not feasible to convert these data into knowledge and to convince
the development organizations that it is beneficial to use these data. Without the knowledge discovery by combining different cus-
tomer experience data sources, there is a danger to miss the complete view of the product and service performance. As a result, the

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A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

Table V. Overview of case study results

Measurement moment Specific problem (requirements)
Before the application C1.1. Data not userfriendly for
of new solution exploitation/queries
C1.2. Data not used outside service
department
C2.1. Time to solution difficult to
retrieve
C2.2. Time to solution difficult to
retrieve
C3.1. Data not shared across
departments
After the application C1.1. Increased userfriendliness for
of new solution exploitation/queries
C1.2. System still not effective to
track back the source of
complaints
C1.3, C2.3. Data not used in NPD
(potential usage)
C2.1. Evaluating customer services
by quality and quantity
(calculate time to solution)
C2.2. System still not effective to
detect the source of
bottlenecks
C3.1. Change of culture
C3.2. Facilitate insights into data,
information, knowledge
High level requirements Solution(s) applied
User-friendliness Transforming unstructured data
into structured data
Access of data across Classifying data
departments
Heterogeneous databases Data integration process
Evaluating customer service Data integration process
Access of data across Investigating why (exploratory)
departments
User-friendliness Problem partially solved
Not effective in navigation Solution to be found
across heterogeneous
sources
Not effective in data Solution to be found
enrichment/knowledge
extraction
Evaluating customer service Problem partially solved
Not effective for quality Solution to be found
management
Motivation of access of data Solution to be found
across departments
Access of data across
departments
Awareness of access of Solution to be found
data across departments
Access of data across
departments

benefits of understanding customer experience data cannot be demonstrated to motivate development organization in continuously
improving their products and services. Without the understanding of the benefits of using customer experience data, there will be
lack of guidance in analyzing the unstructured data and generating the useful knowledge required. Therefore, these three pillars
are highly dependent on each other and should be used in an integrated way.

5. Conclusions
This article addresses a core problem of Q&R engineering: how to learn from customer complaints and other field feedback, such as
service and repair reports, product return reports, opinions written in forums, and so forth, to develop better products. However, there
are several challenges to be considered.
• The information needs are different for different functional departments within the development organizations. Moreover, these
needs are changing over time and not easy to predict.
• The information sources are heterogeneous in form, content, technology, and quality. Often, incomplete or messy data have to
be handled, basically in the form of free text, experiencing many peculiarities such as abbreviations, use of various languages,
typing and writing errors, and so forth.
Current industrial practice often leads to building ad hoc solutions to use some data sources for particular types of information
needs. To compare the academic literature with practice, the research reported here performed three case studies. These case studies
provide much evidence that isolated approaches have many drawbacks. It can be concluded that a multi-perspective approach is
required in solving the problem. On the one hand, methods and tools are needed to turn unstructured data into information and
information to knowledge. On the other hand, people should get to know the value of actively using and sharing data and informa-
tion and become aware of the availability in order for any technical solution to be successful. They should be made conscious of the

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int. 2011
 A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

benefits of quantitative decision making and of the fact that decision support data and information are indeed available in the devel-
opment process; be motivated to use the data and information; and be stimulated to act accordingly. In this way, improving product
quality and reliability will be feasible.

Acknowledgements
This work is being carried out as part of the project ‘Merging of Incoherent Field Feedback Data into Prioritized Design Information
(Data Fusion)’, sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation under the IOP IPCR program.

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Authors' biographies
A.C. (Aarnout) Brombacher obtained BSc and MSc (cum laude) degrees in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Engineering Science at
Twente University of Technology. Aarnout Brombacher is currently dean of and a professor in the Department of Industrial Design at
the Eindhoven University of Technology. He has extensive experience in industrial quality and reliability improvement projects and in
the development of quality and reliability analysis methods and tools. He is currently focusing on developing quality and reliability
analysis methods and tools for designing disruptive innovative systems, products and related services. He has authored and
coauthored over 50 papers on these subjects and has written a book with the title Reliability by Design.
E.E. (Eva) Hopma graduated in January 2010 (with the predicate “Excellent”) as a master student of the Department of Industrial
Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. She completed her study with an essay on the design of Open Innovation
networks. In the research project presented in this paper, she was involved as a PhD student from the Business Process Design group
at the Eindhoven University of Technology. She investigated (in a multi-stakeholder setting) how design skills can be applied to
improve data and information distribution and integration across functions in the New Product Development process. She currently
has a position as a consultant in the Solutions Team of Qurius—an international company that is actively operating in the Information
Technology and Services industry.
A.R. (Ashwin) Ittoo is a final-year PhD candidate from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research interest lies in the
field of Natural Language Processing and, in particular, the development of NLP algorithms for business/corporate applications. He
has published in conferences like the Association for Computational Linguistics, journals like Data and Knowledge Engineering, and
several book chapters.
Y. (Yuan) Lu is an assistant professor in the Business Process Design group at the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven
University of Technology. She is currently leading the data fusion project under the IOP IPCR program sponsored by the Dutch
Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation. Her research and education activities concentrate on the intersection of
business process design and industrial design, especially new approaches towards quality information flows and iterative design
strategies, for intelligent systems and the global market. She has authored and coauthored over 40 papers on these subjects in
international journals, conferences and book chapters.
I.M. (Ilse) Luyk is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. She gained her MSC
(cum laude) and PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, both at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her PhD
research was on user-perceived product quality in consumer electronics products. Her current research interests are user-perceived
quality, innovation management and design management. She published various conference papers and book chapters.

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int. 2011
 A. BROMBACHER ET AL.

L. (Laura) Maruster is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and
fellow of the SOM Research School. She studied Computer Science and received her PhD degree from the Eindhoven University of
Technology, the Netherlands. Her research interests include user modeling and personalization, knowledge management, induction
of machine learning and statistical models, process modeling and process mining. She published papers in journals such as Data
Mining and Knowledge Discovering, Knowledge and Data Engineering, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Information
Technology in Biomedicine and Knowledge and Information Systems.
J.T.L. (Joel) Ribeiro is a PhD student in the Information Systems group at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He received an
MSc degree in Computer Science from the Department of Informatics at Minho University, Portugal. Joel has been working in the
areas of process mining and online analytic processing (OLAP), and his current research is focused on process discovery and perfor-
mance analysis using OLAP-based approaches. His research work is being carried out as part of the Data Fusion project, sponsored by
the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation under the IOP IPCR program.
A.J.M.M. (Ton) Weijters is an associate professor at the Technology Management Department of the Eindhoven University of Tech-
nology and a member of the BETA research group. His current research focuses on data and process mining, i.e. to extract knowledge
from event logs recorded by an information system to analyze the underlying business processes. He is the author of many scientific
publications in the mentioned research field. His papers appeared in journals such as Data Mining and Knowledge Discovering, Infor-
mation Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, European Journal of Operational
Research, Computers in Industry, Knowledge-Based Systems, AI-Review, and Quality and Reliability Engineering International.
Hans Wortmann is a full professor in Information Management at the Faculty of Organization and Management within the University
of Groningen. His special field of interest is in enterprise information systems. He is chairing a Dutch innovation platform, IIP Software-
as-a-Service. He is Editor-in-Chief of the applied scientific journal Computers in Industry. Before joining the University of Groningen,
Hans Wortmann was employed at Baan Company, a leading vendor of standard enterprise software, as Vice President in charge of
R&D. Before joining Baan, Hans served as a full professor in Industrial Information Systems at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
In this role, Hans gained much experience with enterprise modeling and enterprise systems. He advised many companies in various
industrial branches on selection and implementation of information systems in enterprises. He received his PhD in Engineering at the
Eindhoven University of Technology in 1981.

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int. 2011