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.