Development of customer usage profile histograms

Customer use profiles provide crucial information for product design. A good understanding of customer behaviour can help engineers improve their designs. The key problem for customer profiling is that we want to identify that level of customer that will lead to a successful and cost effective design. The upper (lower) limit does not identify the specific customers we are looking for. It just provides the largest (smallest) value of the collected data. In this paper, a parametric (Weibull) technique and a non-parametric (series representation through Fourier series) technique are applied to identify the customer group of interest. An example is presented for each method. The proposed non-parametric approach successfully identifies more characteristics of customer behaviour than the Weibull approach.