Improving the quality of technology-based innovations selection: a quality function deployment approach for retailers

Current advances in technology provide new tools for enhancing the quality of retail service and the subsequent consumers' shopping experience. The large availability of advanced systems, the speed of diffusion and the uncertainty involved in the process force retailers to reconsider how and when introduce these innovations for achieving an advantage over competitors. Hence, selecting the best system for their needs plays a critical role for the business profitability. Despite the importance of technology selection, there are still few works proposing decision support tools for retailers for enhancing this process. This paper suggests a new framework based on the quality function deployment (QFD) approach in order to figure out the best technologies according to retailers' expectations, consumers' needs and technical features, with benefits for the whole retail process.