Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

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Computers & Industrial Engineering

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/caie

A voice of the customer real-time strategy: An integrated quality function

deployment approach
Yixuan Shen a, Jian Zhou a, *, Athanasios A. Pantelous b, Yanbao Liu c, Ziying Zhang a
a
School of Management, Shanghai University, 99 Shangda Road, Baoshan District, Shanghai 200444, China
b
Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics, Monash Business School, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia
c
Shanghai Zhiao Yihaodian Information Technology Co., Ltd., 60 Hulan West Road, Baoshan District, Shanghai 200443, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In the era of Industry 4.0, the rapid development of information technology in the last decade has provided new
Quality function deployment (QFD) challenges for product improvement by enabling users to give their feedback and sentiments in real time. In this
Online reviews paper, combining with genetic algorithm back propagation neutral network, fuzzy inference method, and
Text mining
entropy-based synthesis evaluation method, we raise a full-process product improvement solution driven by
Voice of customer (VoC)
GA-BP neural network
online reviews, from the initial online review collection to the final engineering characteristic prioritization. The
proposed novel integrated quality function deployment-based approach adheres to the customer-oriented design
principle, allowing manufacturers to strengthen the launched product based on the spontaneously-articulated
voice of customer, rather than the traditional expertise. In this way, an off-the-shelf product improvement
strategy is available for enterprises, and its special advantages like fast adaptation and real-time responsiveness,
would significantly reduce management costs, shorten response time to market dynamics, and enhance customer
satisfaction. In addition, a case study in smartphone industry is conducted for illustration, and the results clearly
demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the treatment.

1. Introduction customer-oriented products, as well as for providing sustainable

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a well-recognized planning
process in new product design, development, and implementation,
driven by customer needs and values, which is developed to define
customer requirements (CRs) and translate them into engineering charac­
teristics (ECs) to maximize customer satisfaction within a budget
constraint. The voice of the customer (VoC), which can be captured in a
variety of ways, has attracted significant attention both in academia and
industry because customers’ perception to CRs, as the starting point of
QFD, directly influences the subsequent procedures of QFD, and even­
tually the resources deployment. In practice, questionnaires and in­
terviews are the most frequently used approaches to VoC data
acquisition (e.g., Zhou et al., 2020). However, they are time-consuming,
laborious, and of weak market accessibility. Furthermore, there is a
noticeable time lag between the distribution of questionnaires (or/and
the conducting of interviews), and the product launch, so that the ob­
tained results might be of relatively poor timeliness. Therefore, in an
increasingly competitive market, designing a framework to collect and
analyze VoC in real time and accurately is essential for improving
competitive advantages for the company in the corresponding market.
In the shift to Industry 4.0, product improvement solutions would be
refreshed and improved with the support of digital technologies, such as
big data, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things, etc. As a leading
manufacturer, Haier is a telling example, who developed a mass
customized manufacturing platform, COSMOPlat, to try to grasp cus­
tomers needs interactively through enhancing the information flows of
the user-generated content (UGC). In particular, the recent development
of information technology, and the COVID-19 emergency, have led to a
surge in demand for eCommerce websites for online products and/or
service procurement, providing a new, although very challenging, way
of listening to customer needs and values. eCommerce enables users to
spontaneously express their opinions, give any kind of feedback, and
report their purchase experiences in real time. For instance, for a pop­
ular product in the vast Chinese market, thousands of reviews can be
collected every day on many different channels available, including
eCommerce websites, third-party review sites, and social media. Rather
than just completing some specially designed questionnaires, in these
channels, reviewers are encouraged to express everything they want to,

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: zhou_jian@shu.edu.cn (J. Zhou).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2022.108233
Received 27 November 2021; Received in revised form 24 March 2022; Accepted 5 May 2022
Available online 11 May 2022
0360-8352/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Y. Shen et al.
without any time or space constraints, which enables them to include a
large amount of heterogeneous information, such as factual statements,
sentiments, quantifiable satisfaction feedback, and even constructive
suggestions. In addition to offering multidimensional information, such
online reviews have the merits of high availability and strong timeliness.
Online review data has a distinctive advantage in conveying
customer demands. Nevertheless, in terms of uncovering and summa­
rizing valuable information provided by a very large number of cus­
tomers, it poses an enormous new challenge to practitioners. VoC online
review data is not only big in volume, but also extremely unstructured in
terms of data format, due to the freedom it provides the users to post
comments in any way they want. Machines and computers are capable of
dealing with organized statistics, but are not intelligent enough to un­
derstand and quantify the feelings, sentiments, tones, irony, and context
of human language. In order to comprehend textual content in large
quantities, text mining, as an interdisciplinary technique combining
statistics, machine learning, and computational linguistics, has been
developed to discover inner patterns and extract high-quality informa­
tion from plain-text data. Furthermore, we are concerned that most of
the literature utilizing text mining concentrates on one or two specific
procedures of QFD, rather than complete QFD optimization. See Singh
et al. (2020) for quantifying consumer opinions, Trappey et al. (2018)
and Ozdagoglu et al. (2018) for key terms and CR extraction, and Jin
et al. (2016) and Ireland and Liu (2018) for CR analysis. However, to our
knowledge, the utilization of text mining in the complete QFD optimi­
zation procedure is something that has, to date, received little attention
in the literature (e.g., Jin et al. (2014)).
In truth, for online reviews, such a fresh source of VoC with
completely different carrier and linguistic features, practitioners may be
disorientated about how to process and exploit this type of information,
and therefore, offering a thorough solution of product improvement is of
great practical significance and extensive applicability for manufac­
turers. Motivated by this issue, our paper proposes a full-process QFD-
based solution for facilitating data-driven product improvement, which
may be summarized as follows. First, our treatment comprehensively
selects and defines twenty-eight indicators of online review helpfulness,
from both the customers’ and the product engineers’ perspective, and
constructs an online review screening model of usefulness using an in­
formation entropy-based synthetic evaluation method. Second, this
research conducts CR identification with the support of the text-mining
methodology, and assigns weights to CRs using the fuzzy inference
method. Finally, we map the CRs to ECs in a nonlinear way by imple­
menting a genetic algorithm back propagation (GA-BP) neural network
model in the QFD relationship matrix. On this foundation, correspond­
ing product improvement plans are formulated in the light of generated
EC priorities. Our proposed framework offers practitioners a detailed
product improvement guidance with the merits of quick response and
ease of use, by which enterprises can respond to the constantly growing
and dynamic market in a real-time manner, and thereby, achieve higher
and more sustainable customer satisfaction.
The rest of this research is organized as follows. In Section 2, related
literature regarding the evaluation of online review helpfulness, CR
identification and prioritization, and relationship matrix determination
is respectively reviewed. The proposed novel theoretical framework for
data-driven product improvement is illustrated in Section 3. Further­
more, in Section 4, the Xiaomi 8 mobile phone is chosen as a case to
demonstrate the framework, and finally, some concluding remarks are
provided in Section 6.
2. Related Work
2.1. Online review helpfulness evaluation
Considering the unevenly distributed quality of online reviews, first
it is necessary to evaluate the helpfulness of the online reviews before
making full use of them. So far, research in this area mainly considers
2
Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233
two categories: selection of indicators of helpfulness and model of evalua­
tion of helpfulness. For the former, most end users (i.e., scholars and/or
practitioners) choose the indicators from the perspective of the cus­
tomers, such as metadata features (like emotional review information
(Felbermayr and Nanopoulos, 2016; Krishnamoorthy, 2015) and review
rating information (Heng et al., 2018; Jones et al., 2004; Cao et al.,
2011)) and reviewer features (like reviewer characteristics (Pan and
Zhang, 2011; Zhang and Lin, 2018), reviewer’s disclosure of relevance-
descriptive information (Forman et al., 2008; Korfifiatis et al., 2008)).
Among these, it is worth mentioning that the online helpfulness voting
ratio is regarded as the golden rule in measuring reviews’ usefulness (Liu
et al., 2013). However, to the best of our knowledge, a very limited
number of studies have been conducted so far from the point of view of
product engineers, who are responsible not only for collecting and
analyzing, but also for applying the reviews in the product improvement
practice. In this literature (e.g., Liu et al., 2013; Qi et al., 2016), lin­
guistic features, features based on information quality, and features
using information theory are the most popular features.
Formulating a model for evaluating helpfulness, regression and
machine-learning methods are considered the two most popular ap­
proaches. On the one hand, existing literature performs regression
analysis on selected indicators, such as ordinal logistic regression (Cao
et al., 2011), multiple regression (Ghose and Ipeirotis, 2011), Tobit
regression (Liu and Park, 2015), and partial least squares regression (Lee
et al., 2018b). On the other hand, the common practice of the machine-
learning methods is to collect a training reviews dataset through manual
annotation, and then achieve automated identification based on the
clustering results. For example, see Lee et al. (2018a) for a ten-fold cross-
validation, Lee and Choeh (2014) for the back propagation neural
network, and Hu and Chen (2016) for the model tree approach.
To summarize, for the selection of good indicators of helpfulness,
both customers and product engineers have indispensable roles in the
review usefulness assessment. However, the majority of existing studies
pay considerably more attention to the customers’ perspective, and
there still exists an important gap on the helpfulness of online reviews,
which has not been completely perceived or measured by product en­
gineers. Besides, for the model of the evaluation of helpfulness, most
research prefers machine-learning methods, which may involve some
manual estimation.
2.2. CR identification and its prioritization
The identification of CRs is a vital step in QFD research, as it is the
starting point of the House of Quality. In previous studies, traditional
methods such as questionnaires (Haber et al., 2011; Amritesh and
Chatterjee, 2018), panel discussions (Tontini, 2007; Vanany et al.,
2019), interviews (Medeiros et al., 2018; Ferrari et al., 2016) and
literature inspection (Shokouhyar et al., 2017; Piedras et al., 2006) are
generally used. Further, several studies combine these traditional tech­
niques to comprehensively acquire customer demands (Li et al., 2018;
Dou et al., 2019; Borgianni, 2018; Yang, 2011; Fang et al., 2022).
Nevertheless, in the big data era, online reviews have become an
appealing source of information and business understanding. Consid­
ering the importance of strong timeliness, high availability and spon­
taneous expression, ample research has made efforts to mine CRs from
online reviews (e.g., Jin et al., 2016; Xu et al., 2011; Yin et al., 2013; Li
and Wu, 2010; Singh et al., 2020; Li et al., 2019; Ireland and Liu, 2018;
Trappey et al., 2018; Ozdagoglu et al., 2018; Jin et al., 2015; Jin et al.,
2014).
In addition, understanding customers’ perceptions of CRs and how to
prioritize the CRs is also of great importance to decision makers. In
practice, it is very common for customers to evaluate every CR directly
using a five-point scoring scale (Nahm et al., 2013; Griffin and Hauser,
1993). Also, some group decision-making techniques (Ho et al., 1999;
Zhang and Chu, 2009), and multi-criteria decision-making methods like
AHP and ANP (Lu et al., 1994; Bhattacharya et al., 2005; Ucler, 2017),
Y. Shen et al.
Fig. 1. The proposed novel theoretical framework for data-driven product improvement based on online reviews.
are widely employed in weighing CRs (Zhou et al., 2022). Following the
proposal of the (Kano, 1984) model, several studies implement the Kano
categories (must-be, one-dimensional or attractive attribute) into CR
prioritization (Batarfi et al., 2017; Potra et al., 2017). Furthermore, to
fully utilize the imprecise information implied in judgments and lin­
guistic descriptions, fuzzy theory has frequently been used to assign CR
importance (Gungor et al., 2011; Fang et al., 2020; Wang, 2013). In
summary, looking back at these treatments, the majority involve a large
number of subjective judgments and evaluations, which may largely
depend on previous experience and knowledge.
2.3. Relationship matrix determination
One important use of QFD is to transform VoC into designer technical
language, which is implemented through the relationship matrix of the
House of Quality. Questions such as “what should the relationship be­
tween CRs and ECs be?” and “How should the relationship be
modelled?” have attracted great attention both in academia and in­
dustry. For the sake of simplicity, one mainstream approach is to
consider the relationship in a linear way, and thus propose corre­
sponding solutions, such as linear regression (Celik and Ustasuleyman,
2019; Liu et al., 2018) and linear programming (Becker and Gaivor­
onski, 2018; Kamvysi et al., 2014; Ko and Chen, 2014; Wang and Chin,
2011). However, this linear assumption is so restrictive that it cannot
properly fit the actual design and manufacturing. In order to expand the
scope of applications, an increasing number of studies have preferred to
adopt the nonlinear mode to simulate the relationship between CRs and
ECs, and finally to obtain the priority of ECs through various ap­
proaches, such as the adaptive genetic algorithm (He et al., 2017), 0–1
programming (Geng and Dong, 2017), and other nonlinear program­
ming methods (Liu et al., 2014; Chen and Chen, 2006). Moreover, multi-
criteria decision-making methods are popular alternatives for deter­
mining EC prioritization (Wang et al., 2019; Ping et al., 2019; Ocampo
3
Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233
et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2020; Xie et al., 2020). As opinion varies
significantly on how to model the nonlinear correlation for the rela­
tionship matrix in the House of Quality, further research is needed.
3. Proposed Framework
In this section, a novel theoretical framework for data-driven product
improvement based on online reviews is proposed, and the whole pro­
cess is graphically summarized in Fig. 1, which includes four phases.
Firstly, we collect online reviews for the targeted product through web
crawlers, pre-treat them using a four-step process, and establish a
specialized set of dictionaries, such as a sentiment dictionary. For the
second phase, we select and define twenty-eight indicators under five
key features of online reviews for the evaluation of helpfulness, and on
this foundation, we design a helpful reviews screening model by utiliz­
ing the information entropy method. Further, CRs are extracted from a
product characteristics dictionary through dimension reduction. In
order to determine the weights of the CRs, we formulate two indicators,
namely attention and satisfaction, and the fuzzy inference method is
chosen to identify the inner connection between the CR weights and the
two above-mentioned indicators. Finally, we adopt the GA-BP neural
network to approximate the correlation between CRs and ECs due to its
strong nonlinearity. With the optimized EC priorities outputted by a
well-trained network, product engineers will be able to propose corre­
sponding product improvement plans.
3.1. Online review collection and structuration
As shown in Fig. 1, this framework begins with the collection of the
customer review data. Online reviews are obtained by two major sour­
ces: eCommerce websites and the third party reviews sites, with
different features. The former provides sale service, in which reviews are
in large quantities and with unevenly distributed information
Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Table 1 Table 3
Four steps in data pre-treatment. Indicators of features based on information quality.
No. Steps Definition Common practice Indicator Indicator Description
alias
1 Data cleaning Generally, the majority of Screening unnecessary
the reviews collected from fields, filling in missing Information IQ-NSS Number of subjective sentences in the
websites are in non- values, transforming accuracy review text.
standardized language, in inconsistent formats, and IQ-NOS Number of objective sentences in the review
which data noise such as correcting wrong values text.
punctuation, emotions, through regular expression Information IQ-TIM Number of total elapsed days since the
parsed tags, hypertext or a manual process are timeliness review was posted.
markup language (HTML) commonly used Information IQ-NRP Number of products referred to in the review
codes, JavaScript (JS) approaches in data comparability text.
codes, and comments is cleaning. Information IQ-NPF Number of product features mentioned in
widely present. To coverage the review text.
strengthen the availability Information IQ-NSPF Number of sentences referring to product
of reviews, this data noise relevance features in the review text.
needs to be roughly IQ-RPFR Number of product features/Number of
cleared. sentences referring to product features.
2 Segmentation Segmentation means to Different from English IQ-RPFS Number of features/Number of sentences.
break sentences into pieces word segmentation, IQ-RRS Number of sentences referring to product
containing a word or Chinese word segmentation features/Number of sentences.
phrase, which is the divides successive Chinese
minimum independent character strings into
unit of meaningful several single words or locators (URL), parse the domain name system (DNS) in the identified
linguistic components. The phrases, according to the
URL, and finally download required information in big quantities. In this
precision of segmentation users’ expression patterns,
directly influences the and Chinese semantics and
regard, Python is recommended as the programming language, due to
accuracy of the semantic grammatical structure. high performance, easiness of operating, and its open source nature.
analysis of text. In most cases, raw data obtained through a web crawler is largely
3 POS tagging As the basis of text mining, At present, BosonNLP, unstructured, which poses significant challenges for subsequent anal­
POS tagging consists of Language Technology
ysis. In order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of text mining, data
labelling every word or Plantform Cloud, NLPIR,
phrase with a tag for its Jieba, and SCWS are pre-treatment is necessary, including four steps: data cleaning, seg­
part of speech, namely popular Chinese mentation, part of speech (POS) tagging and stop words removal. The
adjective, verb, noun, etc. segmentation and POS definition and common practice of the four steps are presented in
According to the POS tags, tagging systems/engines Table 1. Furthermore, considering sentiment analysis is a significant
we are able to identify that have been widely
what the targeted word is applied in the existing
procedure in follow-up sections, some relevant dictionaries need to be
trying to describe: a research. established for preparation, including sentiment words, adverbs of de­
feature, opinion, or the gree and negative words.
degree of something.
4 Stop words In review text, some There are several well-
removal frequently occurring but recognized Chinese stop
3.2. Online review helpfulness evaluation
meaningless words like word dictionaries that can
auxiliary words and modal aid with stop word Since review data is provided in very big quantities, and its quality
words are known as stop removal, such as ‘Stop varies a lot, it is challenging for the product engineers to directly obtain
words. Removing stop words list of HIT’, etc.
useful information from it. Therefore, before further work is carried out,
words can largely improve
the efficiency of text it is necessary to establish an effective mechanism to evaluate the
mining. helpfulness of online reviews. In this subsection, the evaluation of re­
view helpfulness includes two parts: indicator selection and quantifi­
Abbreviations: POS: Part of speech; NLPIR: Natural language processing and
information retrieval sharing platform; SCWS: Simple Chinese word segmenta­ cation, and the construction of a review helpfulness screening model.
tion; HIT: Harbin Institute of Technology.
3.2.1. Indicator selection and quantification
As mentioned in Section 2.1, although the golden rule of evaluating
Table 2 review helpfulness from the perspective of customers has been deter­
Indicators of linguistic features. mined, there still exists a gap that online review helpfulness is not
Indicator Indicator Description completely perceived and evaluated by product engineers, who is the
alias actual person to comprehend and utilize the reviews. Therefore, we
Number of words L-NW Number of words in the review text. choose and define twenty-eight indicators under five key features for
Number of sentences L-NS Number of sentences in the review text. evaluating the helpfulness of online reviews for both customers (i.e.,
Average length of L-ALS Average number of words per sentence in reviewer features and metadata features) and product engineers (i.e.,
sentences the review text. linguistic features, features based on information quality, and features
Number of adjectives L-NADJ Number of adjectives in the review text.
Number of adverbs L-NADV Number of adverbs in the review text.
using information theory).
Linguistic features: Linguistic features refer to the text features of
online reviews, and are like descriptive statistics of text information. We
availability. The latter one, as the platform for individuals volunteered select five indicators from Liu et al. (2013) to quantify the linguistic
to share products information and user experiences, contains less but features of online reviews, and detailed information such as indicator
higher quality review data. End-users may make their own decisions on alias, description and reference are presented in Table 2. Among them,
the selection of the data sources accommodating the actual demand. the first three indicators, number of words, number of sentences, and
After determining the data sources, web crawler, a kind of program or average length of sentences, portray information abundance and
script for systematically identifying sites and extracting valid informa­ comprehensiveness (Kuan et al., 2015), while number of adjectives and
tion, is employed to collect review data from a big pile of websites. The number of adverbs convey reviewers’ attitudes and emotional intensity,
operating principle of a web crawler is to visit a list of uniform resource respectively.

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Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Table 4 • Self-information of the product features (IT-SI)

Indicators of features using information theory. On a basis of information theory, for a product feature fj with a
Indicator Indicator Description corresponding feeling, the self-information, SI(fj , S), refers to the
alias total sum of the information about the product feature, and the
Self-information of the IT-SI The sum of the self-information on corresponding sentiment in a review text can be expressed by
product features product features in the review text. ( ) ( ) ( )
Sentiment divergence IT-DS The divergence of the sentiment SI fj , S = − Prob fj , S × logProb fj , S . (2)
sentences in the review text.
Sentiment strength IT-SS The strength of the sentiment sentences In practice, a piece of review probably refers to more than one
in the review text. product feature. Therefore, in reviewi , the total self-information
Positive sentiment IT-PT Number of positive sentiment
contained, SI(reviewi ), can be assumed to be the sum of the self-
inclination sentences/Number of sentences.
Negative sentiment IT-NT Number of negative sentiment information about different product features,
inclination sentences/Number of sentences. ( ) ∑ ( )
SI reviewi = SI fj , Sij , (3)

Table 5 in which Sij indicates the sentiment about product feature fj occur­
Indicators of reviewer features. ring in reviewi .
• Sentiment divergence (IT-DS)
Indicator Indicator Description
alias
Online reviews that contain both preferences and complaints stand
a higher chance of being rated as helpful, and the presence of
Number of reviews R-NR Number of reviews by the reviewer.
different sentiments in such reviews is called sentiment divergence.
Number of friends R-FRI Number of friends of the reviewer.
Number of followers R-FAN Number of followers of the We use the sum of the self-information, SI(fj , S), regarding both
reviewer. positive and negative sentiment, about product feature fj to quantify
Number of being R-FOCU Number of being focused of the the sentiment divergence, DS(fj ),
focused reviewer.
( ) ( )
∑
DS fj = SI fj , S . (4)
Features based on information quality: Liu et al. (2013) report pos,neg

some issues affecting the helpfulness of online reviews, which have to do

with different aspects of the information quality. Hence, as listed in
Table 3, nine indicators of five perspectives of information quality are
employed to assess the helpfulness of online reviews. In addition to in­
formation accuracy (quantified by the number of subjective and objec­
tive sentences) and information timeliness (quantified by the number of
elapsed days), indicators relevant to product features (information
comparability, information coverage and information relevance) take
up a large proportion of this table, because product features are
considered essential information carriers for product engineers in terms
of product improvement, thereby considerably influencing the helpful­
ness assessment. Taking the IQ-NSPF of information relevance as an
example, the more frequently the product feature words occur, the more
detailed the description of the particular features is, and thus the more
useful is the message provided to the designers.
Features using information theory: Information theory is also
considered necessary in the assessment of helpfulness, because it mea­
sures the information contained in the text, and in online reviews (Liu
et al., 2013). So, we consider the first three indicators from Liu et al.
(2013), that are highly correlated with the product features and senti­
ment embodied in review text. Moreover, positive and negative con­
notations, or the orientation of a review, are also important factors that
influence the perceived helpfulness (Zhu and Zhang, 2013; Basuroy and
Ravid, 2013; Hu et al., 2009), so we will also include these two in­
dicators in this category. The five indicators and their detailed infor­
mation are reported in Table 4.
Before expressing these information theory indicators, a concept
needs to be predefined. For a certain product feature, different reviews
convey different emotions, and intuitively, their helpfulness might vary
significantly. Therefore, for a certain product feature fj , given a kind of
feeling, either positive or negative, the probability of this feature, Prob(fj ,
S), is estimated by
( ) ( )
numOfSen fj , S
Prob fj , S = ( ) , (1)
numOfSen fj
where numOfSen(fj ) refers to the number of sentences referring to fj , and
numOfSen(fj , S) represents the number of sentences that present a certain
sentiment inclination towards fj .
Similarly, multiple product features might be included in the review,
so the sentiment divergence, DS(reviewi ), can be calculated by
( ) ∑ ( )
DS reviewi = DS fij , (5)
where fij is the product feature fj in reviewi .
• Sentiment strength (IT-SS)
As the intensity of expressed feelings, sentiment strength is a good
indicator of a reviewer’s attitude towards the product’s features.
Obviously, for any fj , the strongest sentiment can be either positive or
negative, so we choose the maximum value of self-information across
the positive and negative sentiments to measure the sentiment
strength, SS(fj ),
( ) { ( ) ( )}
SS fj = Max SI fj , pos , SI fj , neg . (6)
Likewise, for reviewi which contains different product features, the
sentiment strength, SS(reviewi ), is calculated by
( ) ∑ ( )
SS reviewi = SS fj . (7)
• Positive/negative sentiment inclination (IT-PT)
The positive/negative sentiment inclination is the level of
expression of positive/negative feelings in an online review, which
can be measured by the number of positive/negative sentiment
words.
Reviewer features: Reviewer features are used to portray the pro­
files of reviewers and their behaviors, which provides another dimen­
sion for evaluating the quality of online reviews. Qi et al. (2016)
conclude that the volume of reviews posted reflects the expertise of the
reviewer. In fact, in addition to the volume of reviews, the reviewer’s
online attractiveness and the degree to which they are recognized also
positively influence the perceived review helpfulness (Zhu et al., 2014;
Ngo-Ye and Sinha, 2014). Thus, we insert three indicators into this
category (see Table 5).
Metadata features: Metadata is defined as data that provides

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Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Table 6 For the benefit type of indicator, e.g. L-NW, the normalization
Indicators of metadata features. equation is given by
Indicator Indicator Description xij − minxij
alias aij = i
. (9)
maxxij − minxij
Whether pros is M-WPF Whether pros is completed or i i
completed not.
Whether cons is M-WCF Whether cons is completed or For the cost type of indicator, e.g. IQ-TIM, the normalization
completed not.
equation is provided by
Number of helpful votes M-NHV Number of helpful votes.
Number of replies M-NR Number of replies. maxxij − xij
Number of stars M-NS Number of stars. aij = i
. (10)
maxxij − minxij
i i

information about one or more aspects of data, and is used to describe When maxxij = minxij (the denominator equals 0), aij = 1.
i i
some properties of reviews. According to Liu et al. (2013), as a typical
Step 3. Entropy and entropy weight calculation
metadata feature, the voting ratio of helpfulness is assumed to be the
According to the definition, the information entropy of the jth
golden criterion in evaluating the helpfulness of a review from the
indicator is as follows:
perspective of the customer, because it is one of the most intuitive ap­
proaches for expressing customer opinions.1 Thus, we include five in­ ∑
m

dicators in this category (see Table 6), including the descriptions of the Hj = − k fij lnfij , (11)
i=1
review text (provided by the reviewer), e.g. pros and cons, and the
evaluation level of the selected review (provided by other customers), where
such as number of helpful votes, replies, and stars.
aij
fij = ∑
m , (12)
3.2.2. Helpful review screening model based on information entropy method aij
In fact, the evaluation of the helpfulness of online reviews can be
i=1

considered a multi-attribute decision-making process, achieving a 1

balanced measurement among numerous contributors. As reviewed in k= . (13)
lnm
Section 2.1, most of the adopted approaches involve manual judgement,
such as machine-learning techniques, and these methods are largely We can obtain that 0⩽Hj ⩽1 from the above equations.
dependent on the users’ experience and knowledge. In order to reduce Furthermore, the entropy weight wj of the jth indicator is given
the influence of subjective factors, in this paper we employ the infor­ by
mation entropy method, as one of the most objective weighted ap­
1 − Hj
proaches for assigning the importance of indicators, in our evaluation of wj = , (14)
∑n
helpfulness. n− Hj
Shannon first introduced the concept of entropy into information j=1

theory to measure the disorder or uncertainty of information (Shannon ∑n

and j=1 wj = 1.
and Weaver, 1948). The information entropy method considers data
discreteness in weight determination, and the fundamental principle of
this method is to assign higher weight to those indicators with a greater After the entropy weights are calculated, we employ the synthesis
degree of discreteness, because they provide more useful and diverse evaluation method to score and rank the online reviews. Specifically, we
information. The specific steps of the information entropy method for obtain the overall score for every online review, by multiplying each
weighting the indicators selected in Section 3.2.1 are as follows: column of the non-dimensional matrix A by the corresponding weight
obtained from the information entropy method. Then, we calculate the
Step 1. Evaluation matrix construction overall score of each review, and order the reviews in descending order.
For each online review platform, we can obtain an evaluation End users (researchers and/or practitioners) are free to set thresholds in
matrix X with m reviews and n indicators to evaluate the review screening process, based on the quantity and quality of re­
helpfulness: views collected.
⎡ ⎤
x11 x12 ⋯ x1n
( ) ⎢ x21 x22 ⋯ x2n ⎥ 3.3. CRs and the determination of their weights
X = xij m×n ≡ ⎢
⎣ ⋮
⎥, (8)
⋮ ⋱ ⋮ ⎦
xm1 xm2 ⋯ xmn 3.3.1. CR identification
As discussed in Section 2.2, questionnaires, interviews, expert panel
where xij is the value of the jth indicator for the ith review. discussions, and product specifications are the major approaches to CR
Step 2. Data normalization identification. These methods are technically easy, but have the disad­
Before we proceed, we need to perform data normalization by vantage of not being very timely. Nowadays, with the access to big data,
( )
transforming the evaluation matrix X = xij m×n into a non- the VoC is conveyed in digital forms. Therefore, we aim to extract, in
( )
dimensional matrix A = aij m×n , where 0⩽aij ⩽1. Different real time, important CRs from online reviews.
normalization treatments need to be adopted for different types Before identifying the CRs, we need to build a product characteristics
of indicators. dictionary as our foundation. Existing approaches can be roughly cate­
gorized into two types: POS- and syntax-based dictionaries. Considering
that online reviews might contain grammar mistakes and informal ex­
pressions, we prefer the POS-based approach, which puts lower de­
mands on the source material, to ensure accuracy and completeness in
1
In practice, other types of metadata features might also be utilized to depict the product characteristic identification. To be precise, we tag the POSs
the helpfulness of a review to customers. However, no further discussion will be of the source material in the helpful online review database (established
provided in this paper. in Section 3.2.2), and then pick out the nouns and phrases as the product

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Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

characteristics candidates. Then, we conduct a word frequency analysis fields, while adverbs of degree M and negative words N are
to locate those candidates with a high frequency, and gather them optional fields.
together as the product characteristics dictionary. The captured product Step 2. Calculate emotional values: If M sentences can be obtained from
characteristic words are quite complicated and of a high dimensionality, a review, then the positive sentiment value, Spos
pi r , and the nega­
so, finally, we extract the CRs by performing dimension reduction on the tive sentiment value, Sneg
pi r , of feature pi in review r can be
product characteristics based on the similarity of the semantics. calculated by

3.3.2. CR weights determination based on fuzzy inference method ∑

M
Spos
pi r = Epos
pi rs ⋅Mpi rs ⋅Npi rs , (17)
From the customers’ perspective, how much they care about (i.e., s=1
attention) and are satisfied with (i.e., satisfaction) the CRs are essential
in weighting the latter. Hence, this research quantifies two indicators, ∑
M

attention and satisfaction, with the aid of the text-mining technique. Sneg
pi r = Eneg
pi rs ⋅Mpi rs ⋅Npi rs , (18)
Furthermore, the fuzzy inference method is used to assign weights to the
s=1

CRs based on these two indicators. where Epos neg

pi rs and Epi rs are the numbers of positive and negative
Determining “attention” based on word frequency analysis:
sentiment words occurring in sentence s of online review r with
Attention refers to the degree to which the customers are considered
product feature pi , respectively, and Mpi rs and Npi rs are the
with a given CR, which can be roughly indicated by the frequency with
numbers of adverbs of degree occurring in sentence s of online
which the CR occurs. Generally speaking, if customers pay particular
review r with both product feature pi and sentiment words. As
attention to a certain CR, they will frequently mention this CR when
the reverse expression of an emotion, the value of a negative
expressing their experience as a user/buyer, as well as their expectations
word is − 1, and the value changes to +1 if there is a double
about it. Therefore, for a specific CR, we take the ratio of the corre­
negation.
sponding product characteristics word frequency to the total product
Step 3. Calculate satisfaction: In N online reviews, for the m CRs Q =
characteristics word frequency, to quantify the attention it receives. In N
{q1 , q2 , …, qi , …, qm } identified from the n extracted product
online reviews, n product characteristics P = {p1 , p2 , …, pi , …, pn } are
features P = {p1 ,p2 ,…,pi ,…,pn }, the satisfaction Sqi with CR qi is
extracted. After dimension reduction, m kinds of CRs, Q = {q1 , q2 , …, qi ,
calculated by
…, qm } are identified, and the equation for the attention Aqi paid to CR qi
can be calculated as follows: Spos neg
pi − Spi
∑ Sqi = , pi ∈ qi , (19)
Fpi Spi + Sneg
pos
pi

(15)
pi ∈qi
Aq i = ∑ n ,
∑
N ∑
N

i=1
Fpi Spos
pi = Spos
pi r , Sneg
pi = Sneg
pi r . (20)
r=1 r=1

∑
N
Fpi = kpi r , (16) where Spos
pi and Spi
neg
are the positive and negative sentiment
r=1 values of the product feature pi in all selected online reviews.

where kPi r is the number of times product characteristic pi occurs in the
review text r, and Fpi is the number of times the product characteristic pi
occurs in the texts of all the reviews.
Determining “satisfaction” based on sentiment analysis: As the
name indicates, satisfaction reflects the sentiment inclination of the
customers, where satisfaction and favor imply positive feelings, and
dissatisfaction and criticism imply negative feelings. For a certain CR,
the satisfaction is represented by the ratio of the corresponding product
characteristics’ emotional values to the total product characteristics’
emotional values.
Sentiment is a two-dimensional concept, including both the polarity
and the degree of an attitude. Compared to attention, the calculation of
satisfaction is rather complicated, with four dictionaries utilized: product
characteristics, sentiment, adverbs of degree and negative words. In the
calculation of satisfaction, taking each sentence as a unit, we firstly
check whether product characteristics words exist in the sentence by
matching the segmentation results with the product characteristics
dictionary. If at least one product characteristics word exists, then we go
on to match the sentence to the sentiment dictionary, adverbs of degree
dictionary, and negative words dictionary, to calculate the emotional
values. If no product characteristics word is found in the sentence, then
the sentence is discarded, and we proceed to check the next sentence,
until all online reviews have been processed. The specific process is as
follows:
Step 1. Identify the “product features-sentiment words” pairs: By
matching the segmented sentence with the four dictionaries, we
can obtain a quadruple <Feature words F, Sentiment words E,
Adverbs of degree M, Negative words N> for each sentence, in
which product features F and sentiment words E are mandatory
Fuzzy inference method: As mentioned in Section 2.2, although a
lot of scholars have made efforts to identify the underlying mechanism
by which the factors influence the CR weights, it has been found to be
difficult to exactly and clearly identify the connection. Therefore,
considering its easy-to-understand structure, as well as its interpretable
and intuitive rule-based nature (Jassbi et al., 2006), the Mamdani
(1977)-type fuzzy inference method is adopted in this paper to deter­
mine the internal correlation between the CR weight and the two factors,
attention and satisfaction. The basic principle is to achieve a mapping
based on a set of fuzzy reasoning rules, with crisp inputs and outputs.
The detailed procedures are as follows. Firstly, the membership func­
tions of input (attention and satisfaction) and output (CR weight) values
are fuzzified as triangular fuzzy numbers, according to their corre­
sponding linguistic descriptions. Next, we design a questionnaire for
product engineers and related experts, to collect the recognized logical
“conditions-result” combinations, and then determine the fuzzy infer­
ence rules. In this research, the basic form of a compositional fuzzy rule
can be represented as
Rl : if attention is Al , and satisfaction is Bl , then CR weight is Cl ,
where Rl represents the lth fuzzy rule, l = 1, 2, …, s, attention and satis­
faction are input linguistic variables, CR weight is the output linguistic
variable, Al , Bl and Cl are fuzzy sets defined on the universes of discourse
X, Y and Z, respectively. Thirdly, with a set of defined rules, Mamdani
(1977)’s approach is employed to perform fuzzy inference, which can be
concluded to be a fuzzy max–min operation. Let μAl (x), μBl (y), and μCl (z)
be the membership functions of Al , Bl , and Cl , and then the calculation
can be written as follows:

7
Y. Shen et al.
Fig. 2. The three-layer BPNN structure.
() ()
μC z = maxμCl z , (21)
l
( ) { ( ) ( )}
μCl z = min μAl x , μBl y . (22)
Finally, we convert the fuzzy output values obtained from fuzzy infer­
ence, into crisp values by the centroid method. The obtained crisp value
β is given by
∫b ()
zμC z dz
a
β = ∫b ( ) . (23)
μ z dz
a C
So far, with the inputs of attention and satisfaction, the crisp CR weight
has been obtained through the fuzzy inference method, on the basis of a
set of pre-defined fuzzy inference rules determined based on
questionnaires.
3.4. Product improvement based on a ‘GA-BP neural network’-based QFD
approach
Modeling the relationship matrix between CRs and ECs is a crucial
aspect in QFD, that is, to assess each EC’s contribution in satisfying the
CRs through the correlation coefficients. In practical design, the rela­
tionship between them is normally assumed to be nonlinear, and intu­
itively, the QFD matrix optimization can be regarded as the calculation
of the optimal solution of a system of nonlinear equations. Since the GA-
BP neural network has excellent mapping performance for approxi­
mating complex nonlinear relationships, under this setting, we apply the
GA-BP neural network to the QFD matrix to simulate the optimal rela­
tionship between the CRs and ECs.
3.4.1. ECs and training data collection
Before performing QFD matrix optimization, EC extraction is
required. Considering that our framework is designed to improve an
existing product, it is unnecessary to make major changes to the selec­
tion of the ECs, and thus product specification is considered as the main
component in the EC identification, supplemented by the product en­
gineers’ experience.
Furthermore, in the next subsection, the GA-BP neural network is
employed to construct the correlation between the CRs and ECs, which
requires sample data for network training and learning. Therefore, we
still need to collect and pre-process the training data. In terms of training
data collection, it might be challenging to find sample data for com­
parison purposes, as CRs will be extracted from online reviews, which is
vastly different from the conventional approaches. Therefore, this paper
adopts both questionnaires and expertise from product designers to
construct the training data set, and the data structure is presented as
8
Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233
U = {CR1 ,CR2 ,…,CRi ,…,CRn ,EC1 ,EC2 ,…,ECj ,…,ECm }, where the first n
terms are the weights of the CRs and the latter m terms are the corre­
sponding priorities of the ECs, in the range [0, 10]. Subsequently, to
ensure the data of all indicators are of the same magnitude, the map­
minmax function is used for normalization, which is calculated by
(ymax − ymin ) ∗ (x − xmin )
y= + ymin , (24)
xmax − xmin
where x and y are the input and output data, xmax and xmin are the
maximum value and minimum value of the input data, and ymax and ymin
are the maximum value and minimum value of the output data.
3.4.2. GA-BP neural network-based QFD approach
Back propagation neural network (BPNN): As a multi-layer feed-
forward artificial neural network approach, BPNN offers a nonlinear
information processing model through a simulation of the process of
human neuron reaction. Due to its superior nonlinearity and general­
ization performance, it has been widely applied in various disciplines,
such as function approximation, mode recognition, and data
compression.
As depicted in Fig. 2, the BPNN structure is mainly composed of three
layers, the input, hidden, and output layers, in which two main stages of
the BPNN learning process are completed, signals forward extension,
and errors back propagation. Specifically, after external signals are
received by the input layer, the hidden layers successively process and
transmit the signals, and then the simulated results of the network are
produced by the output layer. However, if the output layer does not
generate the expected results, error back propagation is performed, in
which error signals are transferred from the output to the input end in a
reverse way, and the weights of each layer are adjusted on the basis of
the error feedback. In the repeated signals forward extension and errors
back propagation, the weights are continuously adapted until the output
satisfies the pre-defined accuracy.
Genetic algorithm (GA): GA is a kind of heuristic search and global
optimization technique named based on biological genetics and evolu­
tion. GA encodes optimization parameters as chromosomes, and then,
on the basis of the chosen fitness function, screens them through se­
lection, crossover, and mutation operators. As a result, individuals with
higher adaptability survive and form new populations, which inherit
information from the last generation, but with superior performance.
The iteration ends when the termination criterion is satisfied, and thus
the optimal solution is calculated. With the advantages of global opti­
mization and high parallelism, GA has been used extensively in
computational science, mathematics, adaptive control, and engineering.
GA-BP neural network: Although both BPNN and GA are bionic
theories in intelligent computation, they still pose some disadvantages.
BPNN gives superior fitting performance but can easily be trapped in
local minima due to its limited global search capability. Fortunately,
incorporating GA into BPNN is a feasible approach for compensating the
drawbacks of BPNN because GA is effective at global search. By
broadening the search space, the GA-BP neural network is able to ach­
ieve faster training speeds and enhanced convergence performance.
The flowchart of the GA-BP neural network is depicted in Fig. 3,
which includes three main parts: BPNN structure determination, GA
optimization, and BPNN optimization. To be precise, firstly, the struc­
ture of the BPNN includes the number of input/hidden/output neurons,
appropriate activation functions, and the acceptable error range, which
is defined based on the sample data. Next, we use GA to obtain the
optimal initial weights and thresholds of the BPNN. Finally, based on the
initial weights and thresholds, the training and learning of the GA-BP
neural network are continuously performed until the global optimal
solution is discovered.
So far, with the help of the GA-BP neural network, the nonlinear
relationship between the CRs and ECs has been well modeled with fast
convergence and a shorter training time. Therefore, we can obtain the
Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Fig. 3. The flowchart of the GA-BP neural network.

more than 190 million monthly active users (HKE, 2018), and the
Table 7
accumulation of online review data for them provides a solid foundation
Details of collected online reviews.
for applying our framework. In this regard, we choose Xiaomi 8, one of
Data Number of Details the star products in its smartphone series, for the case study discussed in
platform online reviews
this section to test and verify the effectiveness of the treatment.
ZOL.com 384 text content, time of posting reviews, number of
likes and reviews, score (0–10), reviewer
information (number of posts, friends, fans, 4.1. Online review collection and structuration
followers)
JD.com 500 text content, time of posting reviews, number of
likes and reviews
To collect online review data for Xiaomi 8, both of the major sources,
Taobao. 500 text content, time of posting reviews i.e., eCommerce websites and third-party review sites, are considered. In
com terms of eCommerce websites, three leading platforms in China - JD.
Suning.com 500 text content, time of posting reviews, number of com, Taobao.com and Suning.com - are chosen for their extensive
likes and reviews
coverage of online reviews. As one of the most valuable and professional
third-party websites for IT products, ZOL.com is also selected as a data
corresponding EC priorities by inputting the CR weights into this trained source. Then, we develop a Python program to crawl the webs and
network. Based on the obtained EC priorities, the product improvement collect online review data between 31/05/20182 and 01/05/2019. Part
team is able to propose a comprehensive product improvement plan, of the Python code is presented in Appendix G, and a summary of the
taking simultaneously some other factors into account, including but not details of the collected online reviews is shown in Table 7.
limited to manufacturers’ constraint, enterprise strategy, etc. We pre-treat the crawled data as follows: Firstly, we de-noise the
review text though regular expressions and manual operations, examine
4. Case Study the data consistency, and deal with the invalid and missing values. Next,
since online reviews are typically highly colloquial, containing casual
Smartphone technology is especially sensitive to customers’ re­ wording and being full of incorrectly written words, the accurate mode
quirements, so developing a practicable and effective product in Jieba, which better fits those qualities, is adopted to conduct seg­
improvement paradigm is vital for smartphone manufacturers. As the mentation and POS tagging. Finally, we organize and aggregate four
world’s fourth-largest smartphone manufacturer (HKE, 2018), Xiaomi well-accepted stop words lists: the Chinese stop words list, the stop
has persisted in user-core designs since its foundation, which exactly fits words list of the Harbin Institute of Technology, the Baidu stop words
our research framework for turning updated VoC into product
improvement practice. Moreover, the Xiaomi series of smartphones have
2
Xiaomi 8 was launched on May 31st, 2018.

9
Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Table 8
The weights of the indicators on JD.com.
Indicator Weight Indicator Weight Indicator Weight Indicator Weight

L-NW 0.0491 IQ-NOS 0.0513 IQ-RPFS 0.0339 IT-NT 0.0227

L-NS 0.0484 IQ-TIM 0.0070 IQ-RRS 0.0119 M-NHV 0.0806
L-ALS 0.0156 IQ-NRP 0.0698 IT-SI 0.0863 M-NR 0.1331
L-NADJ 0.0386 IQ-NPF 0.0281 IT-DS 0.0876
L-NADV 0.0461 IQ-NSPF 0.0371 IT-SS 0.0747
IQ-NSS 0.0351 IQ-RPFR 0.0215 IT-PT 0.0213

Table 9
The weights of the indicators on Suning.com.
Indicator Weight Indicator Weight Indicator Weight Indicator Weight

L-NW 0.0463 IQ-NOS 0.0489 IQ-RPFS 0.0309 IT-NT 0.0216

L-NS 0.0462 IQ-TIM 0.0039 IQ-RRS 0.0133 M-NHV 0.0858
L-ALS 0.0128 IQ-NRP 0.0668 IT-SI 0.0828 M-NR 0.1506
L-NADJ 0.0370 IQ-NPF 0.0290 IT-DS 0.0894
L-NADV 0.0444 IQ-NSPF 0.0356 IT-SS 0.0790
IQ-NSS 0.0347 IQ-RPFR 0.0225 IT-PT 0.0184

Table 10
The weights of the indicators on Taobao.com.
Indicator Weight Indicator Weight Indicator Weight Indicator Weight

L-NW 0.0813 IQ-NSS 0.0430 IQ-NSPF 0.0442 IT-DS 0.1108

L-NS 0.0572 IQ-NOS 0.0485 IQ-RPFR 0.0288 IT-SS 0.0980
L-ALS 0.0159 IQ-TIM 0.0097 IQ-RPFS 0.0383 IT-PT 0.0252
L-NADJ 0.0458 IQ-NRP 0.0835 IQ-RRS 0.0165 IT-NT 0.0270
L-NADV 0.0789 IQ-NPF 0.0426 IT-SI 0.1050

list, and the stop words list of Sichuan University, into a refined stop
words list. After matching the segmented reviews with the refined stop
words list, we are able to identify and remove the stop words.
Furthermore, we build a comprehensive and improved sentiment
dictionary including 7176 positive sentiment words and 12062 negative
sentiment words, by integrating two well-recognized sentiment vocab­
ulary lists: HowNet and the National Taiwan University Sentiment
Dictionary (NTUSD). We also identify an adverb of degree dictionary
(219 words) and negative words dictionary (31 words) based on
HowNet.
4.2. Online reviews helpfulness evaluation
To obtain a helpful online reviews database for the subsequent
analysis, we select several evaluation indicators for the helpfulness of
online reviews from both the customers’ and the engineers’ perspective,
and then build a helpfulness screening model based on the information
entropy method.
We try to quantify the twenty-eight review indicators of helpfulness
(mentioned in Section 3.2.1) for each platform, and the collected data
for the different platforms varies slightly. All twenty-eight indicators can

Table 11
The weights of the indicators on ZOL.com.
Indications Weight Indicator Weight Indicator Weight Indicator Weight

L-NW 0.0237 IQ-TIM 0.0014 IT-SI 0.0428 R-FAN 0.0911

L-NS 0.0240 IQ-NRP 0.0346 IT-DS 0.0434 R-FOCU 0.1181
L-ALS 0.0067 IQ-NPF 0.0139 IT-SS 0.0370 M-WPF 0.0453
L-NADJ 0.0192 IQ-NSPF 0.0184 IT-PT 0.0106 M-WCF 0.0453
L-NADV 0.0229 IQ-RPFR 0.0117 IT-NT 0.0102 M-NHV 0.0429
IQ-NSS 0.0174 IQ-RPFS 0.0148 R-NR 0.0811 M-NR 0.0682
IQ-NOS 0.0254 IQ-RRS 0.0059 R-FRI 0.1200 M-NS 0.0038

Table 12
The performance of the indicators before and after applying the helpfulness evaluation model (taking ZOL.com as an example).
Indicator L-NW L-NS L-ALS L-NADJ L-NADV IQ-NSS IQ-NOS

Before 169.3169 5.8649 31.6918 6.6181 13.0805 3.4805 2.3844

After 291.2150 8.9550 41.7283 10.8400 19.9400 5.5500 3.4050
Indicator IQ-TIM IQ-NRP IQ-NPF IQ-NSPF IQ-RPFR IQ-RPFS IQ-RRS
Before 272.0104 0.4623 5.9558 3.2026 2.3136 1.8164 0.6309
After 259.4700 0.8200 9.2500 5.0950 2.7788 2.0824 0.6618
Indicator IT-SI IT-DS IT-SS IT-PT IT-NT R-NR R-FRI
Before 0.1724 0.3416 0.1681 0.0302 0.0323 0.9740 0.0545
After 0.2802 0.5551 0.2383 0.0282 0.0307 1.6700 0.0950
Indicator R-FAN R-FOCU M-WPF M-WCF M-NHV M-NR M-NS
Before 0.1740 0.1195 0.1610 0.1610 72.6390 2.0935 5.4625
After 0.3100 0.2200 0.3100 0.3100 133.4800 3.4500 8.3543

10
Y. Shen et al.
Table 13
Fifteen extracted CRs and corresponding product features.
CRs Product characteristics
Clear screen Screen, Desktop, Touch screen, Capacitive screen, Display,
Main screen, Curved surface, Resolution, Luminance,
Display, Blue light, Interface, Color, Picture quality,
Clarity, Picture, Bangs, Internal screen, Split screen
Durable battery Battery, Standby, Charger, Charging, Fast charge, Power,
Power consumption, Duration, Endurance, Heat, Fever,
mA, Power supply, Power saving, Hot
Clear camera Camera, Flash, Pixel, Selfie, Soft light, Background,
Clarity, Color, Photography, Lens, Picture sense, Artifact,
Picture quality, Beauty, Effect, Shooting, Dual camera,
Picture, Imaging, Photo
Large memory Memory, Capacity, RAM, ROM, Operating speed,
capacity Response speed, Delay, Storage, Space, SD
Complete accessories Accessories, Shell, Film, Glass film, Protective film, Cover,
Mobile phone cover, Earphone, Data cable, Power adapter
Smooth system System, Operation, Smooth, IOS, Android, Black screen,
Bug, Compatible, Flashing root, Frozen, Startup,
Stuttering, Stuck machine, Not stuck, Jailbreak
Complete functions Applications, Programs, APP, Functions, Software,
Navigation, Webpages, Browser, Maps, Entertainment,
Play games, Mobile games, Arena of Valor, Function, Call,
MMS, SMS, Alarm clock, Address book, Information, GPS
Audiovisual Multimedia, Radio, Sound, Voice, Ringtones, Earphones,
entertainment Sound quality, Music, Video, Audio, Movies, Volume,
Player, TV Shows, Speakers, Listening to music, Boom,
Noise, Receiver, Call, Sound effect, Alarm
Beautiful appearance Appearance, Shape, Body, Volume, Gap, Craftsmanship,
Color, Lines, Design, Personality, Shell, Size, Model,
Beautiful, Scratches, Thickness, Frame, Back cover, Back
shell, Size, Pretty
Comfortable feel Feel, Weight, Texture, Touch, Material, Workmanship,
Material
Satisfied service After-sales, Service, Logistics, Customer service, Attitude,
Word of mouth, SF, Seller, Maintenance, Warranty,
Packaging
Reasonable price Price, Cost-effective, Price reduction, Discount, Pricing,
List price, Money, Quotation, Cheap
Fast running speed Processor, CPU, Snapdragon, Quad-core, Single-core, GPU
Good network signal Network, Signal, Internet, WLAN, 4G, Bluetooth, Dual-
band, WIFI, Infrared, Wireless, Network speed
Multi-functional Fingerprint, Unlock, Face recognition, Voice recognition
unlock
be found in the third-party website, ZOL.com, while only twenty-one,
twenty-one, and nineteen indicators are quantified in JD.com, Taobao.
com, and Suning.com, respectively. In these eCommerce websites, we
failed to obtain some of the reviewer features and metadata features
because these kinds of websites have specific privacy policies to protect
the reviewers’ information.
As introduced in Section 3.2.2, the information entropy method is
performed as follows: First, we construct four evaluation matrices as
given by Eq. (8), and then these matrices are normalized using Eqs. (9)
and (10) to obtain the non-dimensional forms. Finally, according to Eqs.
(11)–(14), the entropy weights of the indicators on the four platforms
are calculated, and the results are shown in Tables 8–11, respectively. As
shown in the bold part, although the reviewer and metadata features
cannot be found in every platform, it is obvious that these kinds of
features have a remarkably significant influence on reviews’ helpfulness
evaluations.
After the entropy weights have been obtained, the synthesis
Table 14
Attention scores of CRs.
CR Clear screen Durable battery
Attention 19.37 10.42
CR Smooth system Complete functions Audiovisual entertainment
Attention 9.85 10.55
CR Satisfied service Reasonable price
Attention 0.66 6.72
Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233
evaluation method is used to calculate the score of each online review.
Listing the reviews in descending order, for each platform, we choose
the top 200 reviews, giving 800 in total. In order to illustrate the validity
of our model, taking ZOL.com as an example, we present the indicator
performance of the filtered and unfiltered reviews in Table 12. We
observe that nearly all the indicators have been greatly improved. For
example, the average number of words (L-NW) in the reviews has
increased from 169 to 291, and the average number of product features
mentioned (IQ-NPF) has risen from 6 to 9, showing that the filtered
reviews provide more detailed descriptions and abundant information
for the engineers. Besides, the average number of helpful votes (M-NHV)
of each review has increased from 73 to 133, and the average number of
stars (M-NS) has grown from 5.46 to 8.35, indicating that the filtered
online reviews receive higher popularity scores and recognition from
customers. In other words, the filtered reviews offer insights that help
capture CRs. In addition, the information timeliness (IQ-TIM) has been
reduced from 272 days to 259 days, so that the reviews are more time-
sensitive and representative. Overall, after the reviews have been pro­
cessed by the helpfulness screening model, and only the most helpful
selected, the performance of the chosen reviews has been significantly
improved compared to the performance of the entire sample, building a
robust data foundation for follow-up procedures.
4.3. CRs and the determination of their importance
4.3.1. CR identification
As demonstrated in Section 3.3.1, we build the product character­
istics dictionary and extract CRs through dimension reduction, for which
the “Synonymy Thesaurus of the Harbin Institute of Technology” is
selected as the supportive material, and some manual operations are
included. The fifteen extracted CRs and their corresponding product
characteristics are displayed in Table 13. The fifteen CRs are “Clear
screen”, “Durable battery”, “Clear camera”, “Large memory capacity”,
“Complete accessories”, “Smooth system”, “Complete functions”, “Au­
diovisual entertainment”, “Beautiful appearance”, “Comfortable feel”,
“Satisfied service”, “Reasonable price”, “Fast running speed”, “Good
network signal”, and “Multi-functional unlock”. It is noteworthy that
there might be a slight semantic difference between the extracted CRs
and their corresponding product characteristics. For example, a series of
product characteristics like “Battery”, “Standby”, “Charger”, “Fast
charge”, “Duration” and “Endurance” etc., describe more than one
aspect of a battery, including its durability and speed of charging.
However, we tended to retain the duration as its representative feature
(that is, the CR “Durable battery”) after considering their occurrences in
online reviews. It can be seen from Table 13 that not only the basic
requirements are extracted (e.g. “Clear screen” and “Durable battery”),
but also some updated and even attractive requirements are identified
(e.g.“Multi-functional unlock”), the latter of which would be difficult to
identify through traditional methods like questionnaires.
4.3.2. CR weights determination based on fuzzy inference method
In order to obtain the CR weights, the customers’ attention to and
satisfaction with product needs have to be determined. We quantify
customers’ attention paid to the Xiaomi 8 through word frequency
analysis (Eqs. (15) and (16)), and the results are shown in Table 14. It is
obvious that “Clear screen” is the CR with the highest attention score of
19.37, far exceeding the second highest one. Not surprisingly, CRs
Clear camera Large memory capacity Complete accessories
8.32 9.72 1.65
Beautiful appearance Comfortable feel
4.12 7.58 2.27
Fast running speed Good network signal Multi-functional unlock
2.51 1.19 5.07
11
Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Table 15
Satisfaction scores of CRs.
CR Clear screen Durable battery Clear camera Large memory capacity Complete accessories
Satisfaction 0.2727 0.1735 0.4395 0.3125 − 0.1034
CR Smooth system Complete functions Audiovisual entertainment Beautiful appearance Comfortable feel
Satisfaction 0.4438 0.3919 0.2990 0.4044 0.2840
CR Satisfied service Reasonable price Fast running speed Good network signal Multi-functional unlock
Satisfaction 0.3913 0.6468 0.5281 0.2857 0.3297

receiving the most attention are those must-be attributes like screen,
Table 16
battery, system, capacity, etc. It is worth mentioning that some
Sixteen fuzzy inference rules obtained.
emerging CRs, such as “multi-functional unlock”, are also of high
1 IF Attention IS L Satisfaction IS L THEN CR IS NI concern to users. Moreover, customers are inclined to attach more
2 IF Attention IS L Satisfaction IS M THEN CR IS NI
importance to the product itself than to services.
3 IF Attention IS L Satisfaction IS H THEN CR IS ENI
4 IF Attention IS L Satisfaction IS VH THEN CR IS ENI For the CR satisfaction quantification, we follow the three-step
5 IF Attention IS M Satisfaction IS L THEN CR IS I procedures described in Section 3.3.2, and present the obtained CR
6 IF Attention IS M Satisfaction IS M THEN CR IS I satisfaction scores in Table 15. In general, except for “Complete acces­
7 IF Attention IS M Satisfaction IS H THEN CR IS NI
sories”, all the satisfaction scores of the CRs are greater than 0, with an
8 IF Attention IS M Satisfaction IS VH THEN CR IS NI
9 IF Attention IS H Satisfaction IS L THEN CR IS VI
average value of 0.3716, showing that customers are basically content
10 IF Attention IS H Satisfaction IS M THEN CR IS I with the Xiaomi 8. Specifically, “Reasonable price”, as shown in bold in
11 IF Attention IS H Satisfaction IS H THEN CR IS I the table, has the highest satisfaction score of 0.6468, which indicates
12 IF Attention IS H Satisfaction IS VH THEN CR IS I that the price of this phone is regarded as reasonable and acceptable by
13 IF Attention IS VH Satisfaction IS L THEN CR IS EI
consumers. In practice, the Xiaomi series of phones indeed enjoy a
14 IF Attention IS VH Satisfaction IS M THEN CR IS VI
15 IF Attention IS VH Satisfaction IS H THEN CR IS I reputation of being cost-effective, and this is also a critical competitive
16 IF Attention IS VH Satisfaction IS VH THEN CR IS I advantage of the Xiaomi company. However, the only negative score for
satisfaction, which belongs to “Complete accessories”, should be taken
VL: very low; L: low; M: medium; H: high; VH: very high.
EUI: extremely unimportant; UI: unimportant; I: important; VI: very important; seriously. Otherwise, this dissatisfaction could directly influence cus­
EI: extremely important. tomers’ appetite for buying the phone.
After the attention and satisfaction results have been obtained, the
fuzzy inference method is performed to acquire the CR weights. To apply
the fuzzy inference method, a set of inference rules should first be
determined. In this case, we collect data from two groups of people:
customers and engineers, using interviewing questionnaires (see Ap­
pendix A). In terms of consumers, we adopt a convenient sampling
approach approaching one hundred ten potential interviewees who
intend to purchase a new smartphone within the next year from the area

Fig. 4. The three-dimensional fuzzy inference rules.

Fig. 6. The membership function of the output variables: CRs’ weights.

Fig. 5. The membership function of the input variables: CRs’ attention and satisfaction.

12
Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Table 17
The weights of the CRs.
CR Clear screen Durable battery Clear camera Large memory capacity Complete accessories
Weight 6.2292 4.4806 3.0748 3.5250 3.1901
CR Smooth system Complete functions Audiovisual entertainment Beautiful appearance Comfortable feel
Weight 3.5629 3.8073 3.3326 2.7809 3.1593
CR Satisfied service Reasonable price Fast running speed Good network signal Multi-functional unlock
Weight 1.5510 2.4980 2.1036 2.7785 3.1786

Table 18
Seventeen ECs of Xiaomi 8.
Screen CPU ROM Battery Network
Camera Design Size Weight Body material
Common functions Operational systems Graphics processor Random access memory Fingerprint unlock
Video and audio support Accessories

Fig. 7. The error evolution curve and training results of the GA-BP neural network.

development or manufacturing for at least two years, but also have a

Table 19
good knowledge and the experience of using Xiaomi smartphones. The
EC priorities of Xiaomi 8.
details of the ten invited engineers are listed in Appendix B. As a result,
Rank EC Priority Rank EC Priority the questionnaire is distributed to the one hundred ten participants
1 Screen 6.8224 2 Battery 4.5025 (customers) and ten invited product engineers, and a total of ninety-six
3 Common 3.7546 4 ROM 3.5142 valid questionnaires are collected (eighty-six customers and ten engi­
functions
neers).3 The results of the questionnaires are shown in Appendix C.
5 Random access 3.4653 6 Operational 3.3546
memory systems Based on the results, sixteen fuzzy inference rules are determined (as
6 Graphics 3.3546 8 Video and audio 3.2862 shown in Table 16). Moreover, in order to express these rules in an
processor support explicit way, in Fig. 4, we use a three-dimensional graph for better
9 Weight 3.2657 10 CPU 3.2462 visualization.
11 Fingerprint 3.1432 12 Body material 3.0654
unlock
Before the fuzzy inference can be performed, the membership func­
13 Accessories 3.0332 14 Camera 3.0214 tion of the input and output values needs to be fuzzified as triangular
15 Size 2.9742 16 Design 2.8315 fuzzy numbers according to their linguistic descriptions. The member­
17 Network 2.6352 ship functions of the inputs (attention and satisfaction) are displayed in
Figs. 5(a) and (b), and their input value ranges are [0, 21] and [ − 0.12,
0.66], respectively. Processing the input values using the fuzzy inference
of Shanghai. Our sample includes college students (thirty) from
rules, the CR weights are generated as the output, and the membership
Shanghai University and Tongji University, and wage earners (eighty) in
function is presented in Fig. 6, with the range of [0, 10].
Zhangjiang InnoPark, aged between 18–45. In addition, we also
In order to provide a clear illustration of the fuzzy inference process,
specially invite some product engineers to finish the questionnaire of
we take the CR “Durable battery” as an example. Referring to Tables 14
fuzzy inference rule determination as well. In order to enhance the
and 15, the attention and satisfaction of this CR are 10.42 (corre­
heterogeneity of the engineers group, we identify ten engineers with
sponding to M and H in Fig. 5)) and 0.1735 (corresponding to M and H in
different specialities, who are not only engaged in smartphone

3
In our case, ten engineers are included in interviewing questionnaires. As
mentioned above, all the ten engineers have the experience of using Xiaomi
smartphones, and some of them are even long-time users. Hence, they can be
assumed as a special group of customers, who treat CRs with both considerable
expertise in product development, and the original intention from actual
adopters, and this is the reason why the product engineers are also included.

13
Y. Shen et al.
Fig. 5(b)), respectively. This circumstance meets the inference rules 6, 7,
10, and 11 in Table 16. Processed with fuzzy max–min operation and the
centroid method, the crisp weight value 4.4806 is produced according to
Eqs. (21)–(23). The visualized fuzzy inference process is illustrated in
Appendix D.
Similarly, the weights of all fifteen CRs are obtained by performing
the fuzzy inference method, and the results are shown in Table 17. In
this table, “Clear screen” (bold in Table 17) is the most essential CR with
the highest weight of 6.2292, followed by “Durable battery” with
4.4806. In fact, not a few reviews have mentioned that Xiaomi 8’s
screen-to-body ratio and battery are barely satisfactory, and indeed,
inferior performance of such “must-be” attributes will stimulate an ur­
gent desire among customers for those attributes to be improved.
Moreover, “Satisfied service” has the lowest importance due to its
extremely low attention score, indicating that the targeted customers are
more concerned about the product itself, rather than related services.
The weights of the other CRs are in the same level with small variations.
4.4. Product improvement based on a GA-BP neural network-based QFD
approach
Next, we determine seventeen ECs of Xiaomi 8 on the basis of phone
specifications and expertise (see Table 18). Furthermore, we collect
training data for a GA-BP neural network, which consists of two parts:
CR weights and EC priorities. To be precise, we distribute another
questionnaire to the one hundred ten customers (the same group of re­
spondents we interviewed in Section 4.3.2), in which each of them is
invited to rate the importance of the fifteen CRs in a ten-point scale
(from 1 to 10). However, seven respondents were unable to finish the
questionnaire properly, and we further removed forty-three samples
with repetitive answers. As a result, sixty sets of CR weights are
collected. Further, we request the ten specially-invited engineers to
provide corresponding EC priorities in accordance with each set of CR
weights. Hence, sixty sets of CRs importance with corresponding ECs’
priorities are prepared as the training data set, and being pre-processed
using Eq. (24), subsequently.
After specifying the ECs and collecting the training data, we deter­
mine some basic parameters of the GA and the structure of the BPNN.
The specific settings are shown in Appendices E and F, respectively. We
use Matlab to realize the designed GA-BP neural network, and the core
part of the code is presented in Appendix G. The GA error evolution
curve is shown in Fig. 7(a), and it clearly depicts that the error evolution
curve reaches a stable state with an error value of 5.84, after about fifty
iterations. The acquired optimal initial weights and thresholds from the
GA optimization are used for BPNN training, and the training results are
shown in Fig. 7(b), in which the error of the GA-BP neural network
gradually decreases to the expected level of 0.0001 after only nine it­
erations. So far, our designed GA-BP neural network is well trained to an
acceptable level for mapping the nonlinear relationship.
With the CR weights obtained in Section 4.3 inputted, the trained
GA-BP neural network outputs the EC priorities of Xiaomi 8, as displayed
in Table 19 along with their ranks. Obviously, among the seventeen ECs
of Xiaomi 8, “Screen” ranks top with an importance score of 6.8224,
closely followed by “Battery” with 4.5025, indicating that product en­
gineers should assign more resources to the improvement of these two
features. In addition, “Common functions” should be carefully consid­
ered. Combining the EC priorities and the corresponding online reviews,
we find that customers’ dissatisfaction is mainly concentrated on the low
screen-to-body ratio and disappointing battery life. Accordingly, we
propose an improvement plan for Xiaomi 8, which contains three di­
mensions. First, the screen-to-body ratio of Xiaomi 8 needs to be
increased through the removal of the so-called “fringe” and “big chin”,
which would enlarge the available area of the phone. Secondly, the
battery life of Xiaomi 9 should be prolonged, and innovative charging
approaches need to be developed as far as possible. Finally, in addition
to the attributes that may cause dissatisfaction, Xiaomi should pay
14
Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233
appropriate attention to forward-looking attributes, such as the camera
and unlocking mode, in order to maintain a differentiated competitive
advantage.
In fact, Xiaomi 9, the successor to Xiaomi 8, was publicly released on
February 20, 2019. It comes as no surprise that the new characteristics of
Xiaomi 9 are broadly in line with our proposed improvement plan,
especially for the screen and battery. Xiaomi 9 not only has a vastly
increased screen-to-body ratio, up from 83.83% to 90.7% due to open­
ings design, but also supports 27 W fast charging, which dramatically
shortens the battery charging time. In addition to the two major en­
hancements, there have been a number of improvements to other ECs,
such as the rear fingerprint being replaced by under-screen fingerprint,
etc. Since being launched in February 2019, Xiaomi 9 has received a
warm response from both the market and customers. ZOL.com, as one of
the most professional interactive forums for IT products in China, offers
a comprehensive score for the major IT products, which is drawn from a
large number of customers as well as IT enthusiasts. The comprehensive
score given to Xiaomi 9 was up to 9.00, far exceeding Xiaomi 8’s score of
6.4, and indicating that the new characteristics of Xiaomi 9 fitted cus­
tomers’ wishes exactly. The popularity of Xiaomi 9 also proves the
practicability and validity of our proposed framework.
5. Discussion
5.1. Theoretical implication
First, a full-process product improvement solution, which in­
corporates the informative value of customer big data and the instru­
mental value of quality function deployment, is proposed in this paper.
In the previous literature, online review data has already been utilized in
the field of product development, however, most of the literature
concentrated on one or two specific procedures of QFD (Singh et al.,
2020; Ozdagoglu et al., 2018; Ireland and Liu, 2018), and practitioners
may be disorientated about how to exploit this new form of VoC. This
study built a bridge between product improvement and the big data of
VoC, specifically, online review data provides an abundant and reliable
supply of customer demand, while QFD, as a theoretical mature tool,
offers general guidance of product improvement. In the era of data
science, this off-the-shelf product improvement strategy with special
advantages like real-time responsiveness and fast adaption may gain
some insights for the emerging data-driven product improvement.
Further, previous product improvement methods that extract useful
information from online reviews such as (Jin et al., 2016; Ozdagoglu
et al., 2018; Jin et al., 2014), were built under crisp and deterministic
environments. However, in the practical product improvement, most of
the involved parameters, like customer satisfaction, linguistic descrip­
tion, expertise, etc., always potentially encompass uncertainty, which is
also why fuzzy set theory has been comprehensively utilized in product
development during the past decades. Our treatment making full use of
the advantages of fuzzy inference system, provides an appropriate
approach to model customers’ perception (attention and satisfaction, in
our case) on a certain product with the help of triangular fuzzy numbers,
and as long as human’s judgment, attitude or verbal description are
included, our approach may act as an available solution to give a proper
measurement on them for further exploration. To summarize, the
method we proposed has taken the vagueness existing in product
development into consideration, which suits for a wider range of real-
world applications, especially for the “customer-oriented” design
philosophy.
5.2. Practical implication
While our case was concentrated on the smartphone industry, it
should be noted that our proposed treatment is also applicable to some
other industrial contexts, as long as the target product has accumulated
adequate high quality online reviews, because the quality and quantity
Y. Shen et al.
of selected online reviews are essential data basis of the final results.
What is more, our framework may performed better for those fast iter­
ative products, such as fast moving consumer goods and consumer
electronics, because this kind of products is characterized as high fre­
quency of purchase and wide coverage of target customers, and as a
result, the variation of customers demand and attitude would be
instantly reflected in the review data.
As illustrated above, the review data crawling and processing are
critical components in the suggested framework, and careful consider­
ation should be given to these procedures in practice. The first thing is to
cover as a greater diversity of review data type as possible when
determining the review source, including but not limited to eCommerce
platforms, third-party review sites and social media, etc., because the
obtained results would be more reliable if more multi-dimensional
customer information is collected, despite the increase in workloads
and difficulties in data processing. Secondly, in our case of Xiaomi 8, we
employed two kinds of sentiment words: positive sentiment words and
negative sentiment words, by integrating two accepted sentiment vo­
cabulary lists (HowNet and the National Taiwan University Sentiment
Dictionary). In fact, the numbers of the two dictionaries differ slightly
(7176 for positive and 12062 for negative), and the obtained sentiment
strength might be partially biased by such unbalanced dictionary.
Hence, when practising the suggested framework, it is recommended
that a balanced lexicon with roughly equivalent amount of sentiment
words with different polarities should be established.
Finally, as mentioned in Section 4.3.1, for a CR, we only preserve
those with the greatest occurrence due to some practical restrictions,
whereas this choice does not mean that the other product characteristics
with relatively low frequency might not be useful somehow. When it
goes to the last step of our approach, i.e., formulating an overall product
improvement plan, it is strongly recommended that the practitioners
should trace back to the table of product characteristics, and give a
second thought on those “discarded” dimensions of CRs. Such a review
might provide useful insights and offer inspirations for product engi­
neers, offering a shortcut of creating attractive features, and Xiaomi 9’s
initiative on fast-charging is just such a case.
6. Conclusion
As a critical trend in the transformation of economic structure in
Industry 4.0, the utilization of digital technologies provides significant
supports for the emerging product improvement paradigm. In order to
Appendix A. Questionnaire structure
Table 20
Table 20
The questionnaire structure of determining fuzzy inference rules.
Attention (Level) Satisfaction (Level) CRs importance (ENI) CRs importance (NI)
L L
L M
L H
L VH
M L
M M
M H
M VH
H L
H M
H H
H VH
VH L
VH M
VH H
VH VH
15
Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233
make full use of online reviews, an important form of user-generated
contents, this paper proposes a full-process QFD-based solution for
data-driven product improvement, which is of great practical signifi­
cance and extensive applicability for manufacturers. First, for the online
review helpfulness assessment, we consider both the customers’ and the
product engineers’ perspectives, and include information from online
reviews to evaluate the model construction, which has not received
appropriate attention in the existing literature. Second, we propose two
indicators which are developed with the aid of text mining, attention
and satisfaction, and the fuzzy inference method is applied to prioritize
CRs. Finally, a GA-BP neural network model is designed and adopted,
which is appropriate for the relationship matrix of QFD due to its strong
nonlinearity. With the proposed treatment, manufacturers are capable
of making quick response to market dynamics in a real-time manner
with minimum adaptation cost.
This research is not free of limitations, and also offer channels for
future research. One of the critical limitations is the data acquisition
issue. On the one hand, some personalized data and detailed information
could not be accessed due to privacy protection. One the other hand, the
sources of this research are finite, only encompassing eCommerce
websites and third-party review sites. In the future, other platforms
might prove indispensable for VoC gathering, such as social media and
exclusive communities. In addition to the data acquisition dilemma, this
research presumably fails to offer a thorough guidance of handling
manufacturers’ constraints due to limited accessibility. Therefore,
another possible direction of future research could include manufac­
turers’ constraints and other aspects of QFD into this full-process solu­
tion, further facilitating manufacturers’ rapid responsiveness and
adjustments to market requirements and needs.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the gracious support of this
work by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.
71872110) and the National Foreign Experts Program of China (Grant
No. G2021013045L). Any remaining errors are ours.
CRs importance (I) CRs importance (VI) CRs importance (EI)
Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Remarks: Please check your ideal weight (√) according to the attention and satisfaction level.
Appendix B. Details of the engineers invited in the questionnaire

Table 21
Personal details of the ten invited product engineers agreed to participate in our survey.
Engineer Age Seniority Education Title Occupation

Engineer 1 33 4 Bachelor Senior Technician sourcing engineer

Engineer 2 34 3 Master Engineer testing engineer
Engineer 3 44 8 Ph.D. Senior Engineer embedded system engineer
Engineer 4 34 6 Bachelor Senior Technician radio frequency engineer
Engineer 5 36 6 Master Senior Engineer sourcing engineer
Engineer 6 41 9 Ph.D. Chief Engineer design engineer
Engineer 7 38 7 Ph.D. Senior Engineer interfaces engineer
Engineer 8 33 5 Bachelor Engineer testing engineer
Engineer 9 37 9 Master Principle Engineer support engineer
Engineer 10 35 8 Master Senior Technician sourcing engineer

Table 21

Appendix C. Questionnaire Results

Table 22.

Table 22
The number of interviewees of different levels of attention and satisfaction.
Attention (Level) Satisfaction (Level) CRs importance (ENI) CRs importance (NI) CRs importance (I) CRs importance (VI) CRs importance (EI)

L L 11 80 5 0 0
L M 8 78 8 1 1
L H 75 10 5 4 2
L VH 72 12 6 5 1
M L 2 6 80 5 3
M M 1 9 75 10 0
M H 4 82 8 2 0
M VH 2 88 4 2 0
H L 1 3 6 78 8
H M 2 6 72 14 2
H H 1 1 3 86 5
H VH 0 0 14 70 12
VH L 0 1 1 4 90
VH M 0 1 3 86 6
VH H 0 8 80 8 0
VH VH 0 2 88 4 2

16
Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Appendix D. Fuzzy inference process of determining the weight of ‘Durable battery’

Fig. 8.

Fig. 8. Fuzzy inference process of determining the weight of “Durable battery”.

Appendix E. GA parameters settings

Table 23.

Table 23
GA parameters settings.
Parameters Settings

Population size 100

Terminal algebra 200
Learning rate 0.1
Training goal 0.0001
Training times 2000
Encoding length 347 (15 × 10 + 10 × 17 + 10 + 17)
Crossover probability Single-point probability of 0.3
Mutation probability Uniform mutation probability of 0.1
Initial weight Random numbers in the interval[ − 1, 1]
Fitness function The reciprocal of the squares sum of the neural network error

17
Y. Shen et al. Computers & Industrial Engineering 169 (2022) 108233

Appendix F. BP neural network structure settings

Table 24.

Table 24
BP neural network structure settings.
Structure Settings

Number of input layer neurons 15

Number of hidden layer neurons 10
Number of output layer neurons 17
Number of weights 320
Number of thresholds 27
The inner layer regressive function ( 1 − e− x
transig: f x) =
1 + e− x
The output layer regressive function ( 1
logsig: f x) =
1 + e− x
The performance function ( 1 ∑N
MSE: f x) = (yi − ŷi )2
1 + N i=1

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