How to design and utilize online customer center to support new product concept generation

Websites can be effective vehicles for firms to communicate with their customers but the use of websites has been limited to pacifying complaint customers. To better use a website''''''''s information, this research presents a framework for extracting customer opinions from websites and transforming them into product specification data. For the purpose, firstly, customer opinions were collected from an online customer center and then transformed into customer needs using text-mining. Then, after customers were segmented into several groups based on their needs, relations among their needs were visualized by co-word analysis and product specifications to meet those needs t analyzed by decision tree. Lastly, a final target product specification for new products were determined and a target market was identified based on customer profile data. The suggested framework enables to incorporate customer opinions efficiently with new product development processes and to design online customer centers to better collect and analyze useful information. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.PARK Y, 2004, P 33 INT C COMP INDChen YL, 2003, EXPERT SYST APPL, V25, P199, DOI 10.1016/S0957-4174(03)00047-2Borner K, 2003, ANNU REV INFORM SCI, V37, P179PARK CH, 2003, BUSINESS PROCESS MAN, V9, P652Garcia-Murillo M, 2002, J OPER RES SOC, V53, P875, DOI 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601365Cho Y, 2002, ADV CONSUM RES, V29, P318DYCHE J, 2002, HDB BUSINESS GUIDE CWIND Y, 2002, CONVERGENCE MARKETINDing Y, 2001, INFORM PROCESS MANAG, V37, P817Woo JY, 2005, EXPERT SYST APPL, V28, P763, DOI 10.1016/j.eswa.2004.12.041Sakurai S, 2005, APPL SOFT COMPUT, V6, P62, DOI 10.1016/j.asoc.2004.10.007Su CT, 2006, TECHNOVATION, V26, P784, DOI 10.1016/j.technovation.2005.05.005Kostoff RN, 2001, TECHNOL FORECAST SOC, V68, P223DAVENPORT TH, 2001, MIT SLOAN MANAGE REV, V52, P63Harding JA, 2001, COMPUT IND, V44, P51ICHIMURA Y, 2001, P PAC ASS COMP LING, P127NAMBISAN S, 2001, P PORTL INT C MAN EN, P354Losiewicz P, 2000, J INTELL INF SYST, V15, P99Mahajan V, 2000, INT J RES MARK, V17, P215CHAUDHURI A, 2005, P 3 IEEE INT C IND ICristiano JJ, 2000, J PROD INNOVAT MANAG, V17, P286APTE C, 2000, P 4 INT C EXH PRACT, P19BERRY M, 2000, MASTERING DATA MININLam NWW, 1999, TOTAL QUAL MANAGE, V10, P843Feldman R, 1998, J INTELL INF SYST, V10, P281BALA J, 1996, EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTA, V4, P297FUNG RYK, 1996, P 1996 IEEE INT C SYENGELSMAN EC, 1994, RES POLICY, V23, P1WEINSTEIN A, 1994, MARKET SEGMENTATIONGRIFFIN A, 1993, MARKET SCI, V12, P1PETERS HPF, 1993, RES POLICY, V22, P23HUNT KJ, 1993, INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, V2, P231MITCHELL VW, 1993, INT J RETAIL DISTRIB, V21, P15CHOU PA, 1991, IEEE T PATTERN ANAL, V13, P340, DOI 10.1109/34.88569FORNELL C, 1987, J MARKETING RES, V24, P337KANO N, 1984, J JAPANESE SOC QUALI, V14, P39