Capturing the customer’s voice, the centerpiece of strategy making: A case study in banking

For sustainable competitive advantage a firm must be able to create and retain customers. One of the necessary conditions for this is that a firm's product must be able to meet the customers' needs and wants. For product planning and development, a firm therefore needs to know what customers want from a product. Professor Kano suggests a model that helps us identify which functions or features of a product cater to the basic needs, performance needs or excitement needs of a customer. This paper discusses how Kano's model can be applied to identify how customers perceive services of a bank. The importance of Kano's model is that it involves little mathematical computation and relevant information can be obtained quickly.