Identification of Product Improvement Directions Through Customer Experience Analysis Considering Product Usage Period

The interest and satisfaction of customers with a product vary based on how long they use it for. Prior studies have employed online reviews as a means of enhancing product quality; however, the evolution of customer perceptions over the product usage period has not been well addressed. Therefore, this paper suggests a method for tracking changing customer experiences to enhance products. Steps of the method are as follows: 1) collecting and preprocessing product reviews; 2) identifying product features through topic modeling; 3) calculating and ranking product features’ Importance and Performance over usage periods; and 4) suggesting improvement directions through Dynamic Importance-Performance Analysis. A case study on eight types of smartwatch products is conducted to demonstrate the proposed method. This method can be used as a support tool for companies to improve product strategies by analyzing customer experience and suggesting specific product improvement directions over the product usage period.