Crowdsourcing customer needs for product design using text analytics

In product design and engineering, identifying customer needs is the foundation for designing and producing a successful product. Traditionally, a range of techniques have been employed to elicit customer needs. A relatively new technique for identifying customer needs is ‘crowdsourcing’. An emerging area of research is the crowdsourcing of customer needs from online product review sites. This paper proposes a simple process for crowdsourcing customer needs for product design using text analytics. The analysis/visualization method is presented in detail. The text content of online customer reviews for a popular product is collected and processed using text analytics software. A published case study identifying expressed customer needs for the same generic product, collected via conventional means, is used to successfully validate the findings from the text analytics method.