Focusing Aspects of Customer Acceptance for Planning Product-Service Systems – A Case Study from Construction Machines Industry

Aspects of customer acceptance describe reasons and issues that are relevant for customer decisions for or against purchasing a product. In previous works, we have built a model of those aspects that serves as a checklist for identifying relevant aspects. Furthermore, we have built a customer-oriented framework for planning and developing of Product-Service Systems (PSS). This framework models relations between customers, aspects of customer acceptance, and the PSS. PSS is considered as an approach to better meet customer requirements and to improve customer benefits from using a product. By adding services and integrating tangible product contents and intangible service contents to one market offer, PSS can be advantageous for the aspects of customer acceptance. The customer-oriented framework makes a PSS concept to focus on aspects of customer acceptance. In this work, we adapted and applied this framework for a case study in construction machine industries. This case study aimed on evaluating methods, models, and processes we built in previous work for increasing customer acceptance and to identify strengths, weaknesses, and potential for optimization of those methods, models, and processes.