An integrated framework for importance-performance analysis of product attributes and validation from online reviews and maintenance records

Abstract

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is widely used for needs analysis, product positioning, and strategic planning in product design. Previous research on IPA often employs single-source data such as customer surveys or online reviews with unavoidable subjective bias. In contrast, product maintenance records provide objective information on product quality and failure patterns, which can be cross-validated with customers’ personal experiences from surveys or online reviews. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for conducting IPA from online reviews and product maintenance records jointly. An attribute-keyword dictionary is first established using keyword extraction and clustering methods. Then, semantic groups, including product attributes and associated descriptions, are extracted using dependency parsing analysis. The sentiment scores of identified product attributes are determined by a voting mechanism using two pre-trained sentiment analysis models. The importance of product attributes in IPA is estimated from the impact of sentiments of each product attribute on product ratings with the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) model, while the performance is estimated from the sentiment scores of online reviews or the quality statistics from product maintenance records. In addition, we propose two methods to validate the IPA results, in which the IPA results are compared with the actual product improvements on the market or compared with the analysis of customer reviews from different time periods, respectively. The validated IPA results from online reviews and maintenance records are then integrated to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of customer needs. A case study of passenger vehicles is used to demonstrate the framework. The proposed framework enables automatic data processing and can support companies in making efficient design decisions with more comprehensive perspectives from multisource data.

Keywords

• importance-performance analysis
• maintenance records
• online reviews
• product design
• text mining