The extended integrated model of Kansei Engineering, Kano and TRIZ incorporating cultural differences in services

The fulfillment of customer emotional needs (Kansei in Japanese) tends to be highly expected especially in growing industries such as service industries. Recent research shows that emotions is equally important as cognition in service encounter. It is, thus, to achieve service excellence for customer, service provider should not overlook the significant roles of both emotional and cognitive aspects. In modeling of how to capture and translate customer emotional needs into services, Kansei Engineering is used. This study aims to integrate Kansei Engineering with Kano model and TRIZ. Kano model is used to identify the relationship between service attribute performance and customer satisfaction, whereas TRIZ is utilized subsequently to generate designs of improvement with lowest contradiction among the proposed design alternatives. Due to relatively unexplored cultural differences in Kansei research, thus, cultural factors are considered and engaged with the integrated model. It is hoped that more insights about customer emotional needs in different backgrounds will be better understood, so that the improvement strategies will be well fitted. In addition, for an illustration of applicability of the integrated model, an empirical study in a certain service taking into account local and foreigner will be discussed. Keywords: Kansei Engineering, Kano, TRIZ, services, cultural difference