Today's customers are more demanding and quality-conscious. For a manufacturer or service provider, it is really a challenge to tune up their products or services in line with customers' demands. The paper focuses on the application of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) on a typical service through designing the house of quality matrix. Demanded qualities are captured by using a questionnaire survey designed in a semi-structured way on the basis of a Likert's 5-scale technique. As customers drive manufacturers or service providers to add values, proper care was taken to understand their reactions and then the requirements were incorporated in the House of Quality (HOQ) that ultimately gives the solution. The study is aimed at understanding how a service provider can improve customer satisfaction.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a way of making the `voice of the customer' heard throughout an organization. It is a systematic process of capturing customer requirements and translating these into requirements that must be met throughout the supply chain. The result is a new set of target values for designers, production people, and even suppliers to aim at, in order to produce the output desired by customers. It is sometimes referred to by other nicknames, such as, "the voice of the customer" (from its use as a way of communicating customer needs), or "the House of Quality" (HOQ) (from the characteristic house shape of a QFD chart).

QFD has been an important tool for translating the voice of customer into product specification (Akao, 1990; Clausing, 1994; and Cohen, 1995). It has been widely used for product development and quality improvement around the world. It is a customer-oriented approach, supporting design teams in developing new products based on an assessment of customer needs. Basically, in the QFD, customer needs are translated into design attributes. The design attributes are then deployed in the process and quality requirements.

To begin the design process in the QFD, the design team needs to listen to the voice of the customer. Satisfied customers are the key to successful competition. However, the question is how to incorporate the customer's spoken, unspoken, present, and future needs into a company's products or services. Many organizations have found the answer in QFD. Different types of customers' needs and level of satisfaction, in terms of the degree of requirements fulfilled, may be analyzed by using the Kano Model as presented in Figure 1. Various studies report that customers are more satisfied when they have their unspoken demands (non-voice) fulfilled from a typical product or service.

Management Research Journal, Quality Function Deployment, QFD, House of Quality, HOQ, Product Development, QFD Methodology, Total Quality Management, TQM, Statistical Quality Control, SQC, Total Quality Control, TQC, Business Management, QFD Applications, Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers, JUSE, Process Planning, Production Planning, QFD Tool.