Quality function deployment (QFD) application in services: a literature analysis

Abstract

The growing competition has forced companies to provide innovative services to exceed customer expectations by ensuring their competitiveness in the market. Understand what the customer needs are and how to meet them it is an imperative for organizations. The quality function deployment (QFD) is a method that seeks to achieve this purpose. In this context, this paper aims to demonstrate QFD applied to the service context through a literature review. To meet these objectives, a structured process of bibliographic search and organization was applied to select and analyze a portfolio of 25 articles strictly linked to the central subject of QFD applied to services. The results show that the use of QFD is frequently restricted to the first matrix and to the survey of customer needs and characteristics of service quality, which limits its application. Moreover, some important findings is that the method is usually applied with other tools in order to fill some of QFD limitations and, when applied to services context, the method is mainly applied in order to improve services that are already offered, not being largely applied on new services development.