RW Humes & Company

needs assessment

Understanding customers' needs is crucial to the development of new products or services and for determining the relevant "hot buttons" when preparing a customer satisfaction measurement. A needs assessment is a qualitative study that will provide rich information about customers', suppliers', and employees' needs.

A needs assessment is often used as an exploratory tool. We gather information that is used to analyze business strategies and the viability of new products and services, to optimize features of new products and services, and to identify and analyze industry trends. For example:

Does a new product or service idea warrant a feasibility study?
Do the proposed features and benefits of a new product or service meet customers' needs?
Are there needs or issues we don't understand or know about?
Are there applications for a product or service that we have not thought of?
Are there customers for our products and services in a new region?

A needs assessment is used when preparing for quantitative studies. For example:

What are the relevant attributes for our customer satisfaction or employee alignment survey?
What is the relative importance of the attributes in our customer satisfaction study? How do we weight attributes when calculating satisfaction indexes?

Tradeoff studies, such as Conjoint Analysis, can be employed in needs assessments.

The results of a needs assessment cannot be projected to the population because of the small number of respondents in a qualitative study.

Solutions

needs assessment