Follow up on customer suggestions; conduct formal interviews, review warranty reports, conduct on-site meetings and product reviews
Survey.
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Utilization of market research early in the new product development process, and continuing throughout the entire development phase is critical to ensuring success.
Survey data.
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Voice of the Customer Information as a Best Practice for the NPD process: 1) Market and buyer behavior studies are a valuable source of information for planning the market launch. 2) Market research as a tool to help define the product. 3) The customer or user ought to be an integral part of the Development process. 4) Identification of customers or users real or un-articulated needs and their problems, is considered fundamental to voice-of-the-customer research, and should be a key input to product design. 5) Working with highly innovative users or customers.
A quantitative survey of 105 business units, supported by team's experience in NPD modeling, consultation, application and analysis.
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Use the Internet to assist with customer and product support. Train salespeople and provide them answers to product questions online.
Source: The Baan Company: Case Study (2002), FileNew Corp: Case Study (2002), Tompkins Group: Case Study (2002). In: Ozer, M. (2003)

When conducing evaluations, keep in mind that customers are likely to retain or switch suppliers on the basis of service (55%), quality (7%), or price (7%).
Source: Forum Corporation, 1988. In: Datar, S., Jordan, C.C., Kekre, S., Rajiv, S. & Srinivasan, K. (1997)

Failure mode effect analysis (FMEA) techniques help the design team to study the causes and effects of product failures. FMEA specifies the various conditions the product will endure, and tests, how it reacts under those conditions, allowing designers to plan a product that will withstand a broader range.
Experiential. Authors' knowledge.
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Continually observe and correct problems or errors made by team members to improve the quality of decision making and implementation.
Literature review
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Failure Knowledge Network (FKN) — captures and inter-relates mechanical product quality knowledge from five areas: (i) the connection between failures and product functions, (ii) the relationship between failures and product components, (iii) the correlation between failures and organizations, (iv) the association between failures and product processes, and (v) the conjunction among different failures. FKN information is represented in a four-dimensional matrix that includes components, functions, processes and organization. Each element in the matrix is a failure scenario and represents the related failures within the corresponding dimensions. Conventional factors of failures are embodied in the FKN representation. They include event, detection, effect, severity, solution weight, cause, monitor, reappearance, operation, efficiency and precaution. The indexes of each factor are provided by subject matter experts and are set in accordance with the correlation between corresponding characteristics and failures
Failure knowledge based decision-making in product quality.
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Product quality-related decision-making using the Failure Knowledge Network (FKN) — The first step of the decision-making process is the identification of related failures and characteristics. The second step is determination of the important characteristics of the clusters. Next, there is a comparison between the characteristics of each target. Finally, the interdependent priorities of the characteristics are determined by analyzing dependencies among the targets and characteristics.
Failure knowledge based decision-making in product quality.
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One drawback to using Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is that it has deficiencies in the expression of the relationship between different failure components. As a result it can not be used as a technique for knowledge formulation. One way to represent and share failure information is to construct a knowledge network of failure scenarios.
Source: Dai (2009). In: Dai,W., Maropoulos, P.G. &Tang, X.Q. (2010)

One of the reasons that product quality failures reoccur is that the knowledge of past failures is not well represented or readily-available to respective parties. One way to represent and share past failures is to construct a knowledge network of failure scenarios.
Source: Hatamura (2003). In: Dai,W., Maropoulos, P.G. &Tang, X.Q. (2010)

Use the Internet to assist with customer and product support. Train salespeople and provide them answers to product questions online.
Source: The Baan Company: Case Study (2002), FileNew Corp: Case Study (2002), Tompkins Group: Case Study (2002). In: Ozer, M. (2003)