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The fulfilment of customers’ emotional needs (Kansei in Japanese) tends to be highly expected, especially in growing industries such as the service industry. Recent research shows that emotion is just as important as cognition in service-related encounters. Thus, service providers should not overlook the significant roles of both emotional and cognitive aspects in achieving service excellence for customers. In modeling how to capture and translate customers’ emotional needs into services, Kansei Engineering (KE) is used. This study aims to integrate Kansei Engineering with the Kano model and the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ). The Kano model is used to identify the relationship between service attribute performance and customer satisfaction, whereas TRIZ is utilized subsequently to generate designs for improvement with the lowest contradiction between the proposed service design solutions. Due to relatively unexplored cultural differences in Kansei research, cultural factors are also considered and incorporated into the integrated model. It is hoped that further insight into the emotional needs of customers from different cultural backgrounds will be better understood, so that the improvement strategies will be suitable. In addition, to illustrate the applicability of the integrated model, an empirical study in a medium-sized restaurant that takes into account both Indonesian and non-Indonesian customers will be discussed. |
