Improving Product Quality and Reliability with Customer Experience Data Aarnout Brombacher, a,{ Eva Hopma, a Ashwin Ittoo, b Yuan Lu, a * † Ilse Luyk, a Laura Maruster, b Joël Ribeiro, c Ton Weijters c and Hans Wortmann b Advance technology development and wide use of the World Wide Web have made it possible for new product development organizations to access multi-sources of data-related customer complaints. However, the number of customer plaints of highly innovative consumer electronic products is still increasing; that is, product quality and reliability is at risk. This article aims to understand why existing solutions from literature as well as from industry to deal with these increasingly complex multiple data sources are not able to manage product quality and reliability. Three case studies in industry are discussed. On the basis of the case study results, this article also identifies a new research agenda that is needed to improve product quality and reliability under this circumstance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: customer experience; product quality and reliability; customer complaints; no fault founds; new product development 1. Introduction M any businesses in electronics industry are currently struggling to deliver products and services that meet customer expecta- tions. From a technological perspective, almost anything is possible, but the difficulty for many companies is to create value propositions that really add value to end users. 1 Earlier research has already shown that the number of customer complaints and product returns is increasing for complex consumer electronics. 1 To deal with these customer complaints, product development organizations need to search proactively for customer experi- ence data to understand where these customer complaints originate. Customer experience data refer to the customer experience related to the products and the service levels. Subsequently, they should act accordingly in the development process on the basis of the information generated from this experience data to deliver products that meet customer expectations. 3 Two decades ago, the innovation in products was mainly in the field of mechanics and electronics. Products were created with an often clear and straightforward function for the user, and the main reason to complain for a customer was when, because of the breakdown of an electronic or mechanical part, the product was no longer able to fulfill this function. Handling this complaint in the new product development (NPD) process was straightforward: carefully registering the number of defective components in the field and taking appropriate action when necessary. 4 Because of the increase of processing powers as predicted by Moore’s law, it has been technologically and economically feasible to include multiple functions and thousands extra lines of software code in electronic products. As a result, these products have many diverse functionalities and are often connected with other products and environments. In short, these products are increasingly com- plex, resulting in an expensive number of customer complaints. Specifically, for current consumer electronics products, this observed increasing number of complaints is particularly visible in the growing number of so-called no fault founds (NFF)—user complaints of which the cause cannot be retrieved as technical malfunctioning but which relate to misalignment between product capabilities and customer expectation. 1,2,5–7 Earlier research has also shown that the percentage of NFF is in some cases higher than 50% of the total customer complaints and still increasing. Therefore, relying on traditional customer experience data alone such as NFF data (service center data) is insufficient to reduce the customer complaints for these complex products. 8,9 Fortunately, continuously additional sources of customer experience data of these highly complex products are becoming avail- able. First, customers have new and low threshold channels to share their opinion, experience, or complaint about an acquired— or experienced—product or service, especially due to the wide use of Internet. When accessible, this information may have a strong a Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 5135600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands b Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, 9747, Groningen, The Netherlands c Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 5135600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands *Correspondence to: Yuan Lu, Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 5135600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. † E-mail: y.lu@tue.nl { The author list follows alphabetic order. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int. 2011 Research Article (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/qre.1277 Published online in Wiley Online Library