Remote customer interaction in frugal product development: model with customer evaluation

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to deliver an efficient structured methodology for spatially distributed but collaborative frugal product development to fulfil the requirements of emerging markets. The utilisation of local content, customer feedback, and preferences are respected to enable the customisation of products and attributes in the customer's environment. Virtual customer inspection tool based on augmented reality is developed and presented for remote customer interactions, recording feedback, preferences, and customisations. The developed tool enables the interaction of the customer with the product in digital, semi-finished, and finished form, which is capturing customer experiences, integrates geographical spread, and validates the product in the customer's environment. To achieve this, the tool uses intelligent decision-making with the incorporation of analytic hierarchy process, where satisfaction evaluation of the customer is used to achieve optimal requirements for frugal product development. The developed tool and associated remote virtual customer interactions are demonstrated with use cases.