The Divorce of Word and Deed — A Data-mining Approach to Identify and Evaluate Customer Requirements
This is a joint seminar organized by HKU Business School’s IIM Area and Institute of Digital Economy & Innovation (IDEI).
Prof. Juan (Jane) FENG
Hon Hai Chair Professor | Department of Management Science & Engineering
School of Economics & Management
Tsinghua University
The advancement of IT has made it possible to understand customer requirements through publicly available information, such as online word-of-mouth. We extend previous literature that studies customer requirements through a single information source of online review, by proposing a framework of incorporating one additional information source, that is, consumers’ purchase records. This enables us to examine the relationship between customers’ expressed satisfaction (words) and their actual purchase (deeds). Utilizing unique data sets about the actual sales records as well as online review information in a cell phone market, we mine and characterize each product feature in a two-dimensional model, based on how important they are to customers’ expressed satisfaction as well as actual purchase. We find that, surprisingly, consumers’ words and deeds are not always consistent: while some requirements are expressed as important features in determining customer satisfaction in ‘words’, they do not stand out in factors that influence consumers’ purchase; there are also requirements that are ‘silent’ in satisfaction, while customers value them when making purchase. This implies the importance of incorporating the “deed” dimension into the understanding of customer requirements. Understanding the differences in product requirements reflected from these two dimensions offers guidelines for better product design, such as which features to improve/innovate, and which features to differentiate from the competitors.
Professor Juan (Jane) FENG holds a B.A. in Economics from Renmin University of China, and a PhD in Business Administration from Pennsylvania State University, with a dual title in Operations Research. She is currently Hon Hai Chair Professor at the Department of Management Science and Engineering as well as Vice Chair of Research Center for Digital Economy (Greater Bay Area), School of Economics and Management Shenzhen Research Institute of Tsinghua University.
She serves as Senior Editor for Information Systems Research, Production & Operations Management and E-Commerce Research & Applications. She also serves at the editorial board for JMIS and IJEC. Jane’s research interests are in economics of Information systems, focusing on both analytical modeling and empirical analysis. She has been working on topics such as keyword auctions, advertising and pricing, the economics of online review, block chain and data ownership, etc.
