This statement published on Forbes blog inspired me to take another look at customer satisfaction with tablets in question.

If there was ever a chance for a tablet contender to take a run atApple’s dominance in the tablet market, it was Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Not the myriad Android-based products. And certainly not RIM’s Playbook. No, the job was up to the Kindle Fire and the moment it needed to go in for the kill was the holidays. Amazon tried and failed. Now it’s over.

The complete post can be found here.

The premise of this article is based on assumption that people who were planning to buy iPad, would purchase Kindle Fire instead. I think this is a false assumption. In fact analysis of reviews from 7,897 customers shows that both tablets exceeded expectations of their customers, albeit by a different margin. I included the analysis of Samsung Galaxy Tab (10.1″) to make it more interesting, because it is probably the distant 3rd in this race for customer’s affinity. Apple clearly beats Amazon and Samsung Tab in Customer Support (1.03), Design (1.33), Screen size (1.75) and Usability (1.82). However Kindle Fire leads in General Satisfaction (1.35), Price (1.31), and Reliability (1.07).

I will publish the link to the interactive dashboard on our Google+ page along with the video on How to Navigate Market Intelligence Dashboard.

We have recently created  our new Google+ page to publish regular updates of Customer Intelligence Analysis and Market Intelligence Analysis reports for specific products and market segments contained in our data base. These reports are the samples we produce for our own research and training of our Opinion Mining software and based on the analysis of the data subsets, which may or may not be statistically representative of all Customer Generated Content (CGC) available online. The reports will be published a few times per week as long as there is sufficient interest, i.e. visitors who have Amplified Analytics in their circles.

Please visit Amplified Analytics Google+ page, join Google+ if you are not yet on it, and include it into your circle to get updates every time new content is published.

It is an inescapable part of our existence that we have to make important decisions in our private and professional lives without sufficient amount of information. In fact, in most cases, there is no amount of information that can make an output of a decision to be certain. We can only improve our odds (i.e., increase a probability of a decision to produce the desired outcome) by making a “good” decision. The process includes gathering relevant information, analyzing it and making good judgment in an effort to reduce economic uncertainty.

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” — Will Rogers

Presumably management decisions are made by experienced people, and the more important these decisions are, the more experienced are the people who suppose to make it. However, people who make it to the higher ranks in management hierarchy are often those who avoided making mistakes before or at least managed not to be caught making them. In other words, most career-minded people often display a risk-averting behavior. If this is true, then the management decision-making process is irrational according to Dan Ariely, the author of best-selling books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. In his blog post, Dan wrote:

”Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”

One needs to make uncommon decisions to achieve uncommon results, even though the consequences of being wrong can be devastating. Just ask Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappo.com, who decided to allocate most of his marketing budget to fund customer support call center and to turn upside down the most common Customer Service Reps’ performance measurements. Their call center has become their marketing growth engine that generates customer retention, Word of Mouth and revenue per customer returns that outpace common marketing investment performance by a wide margin.

We often rely on the “knowledge” of the past, while the rate of change around us seems to escalate relentlessly, and traditional approaches to gathering, analyzing and judging the relevance of information we consume to make decisions today seem to be less than adequate. Big help could be found in uncommon sources of empirical information and market intelligence, particularly if it challenges your institutional orthodoxy. Change requires courage and conviction according to Jim Farley, Group VP, Global Marketing, Sales and Service at Ford Motor Company. Here is what he said in a recent interview with Brian Solis:

This analysis of customer reviews for Kindle Fire vs Asus Transformer Prime shows the attributes of customer experience that are the most important to the customers and how their experience meets their expectations. Click on the image of dashboard to make it larger.

This article was originally published at CustomerThink.com and being re-posted with some updates and modifications.

Marketers used market segmentation methods for a very long time. However, as our abilities to collect and manage information continues to improve, the new methods of segmentation become available to enable more targeted marketing efforts for marketers and better products and services for consumers. One of the most commonly accepted strategies utilized is demographic segmentation based on an assumption that a specific group (based on age, gender, etc) is a primary consumer of your product or service. Sometimes this assumption is based on the product purchase history. Regardless of the validity of an assumption, it does not often provide an insight on “WHY” this demographic segment would select the product in question or “HOW” they would use it. In other words, there is a lot of guessing that has to take place or additional segmentation strategies to be deployed. In my opinion, the popularity of demographic strategy lay mostly in its low cost and ease of access as behavioral and psychographic segmentation requires a lot of research that translates into high cost and time-to-market constraints.

The advances in technology start to offer new opportunities for market segmentation based on automated analysis of customer-generated content which is becoming available with the proliferation of social media and the rise of Social Consumer. Essentially instead of assuming what demographic group would be the ideal target for our marketing efforts, we could look at a group that already expressed their interest by purchasing specific types of products or services and learn “WHAT” elements of their experience were important to them.

Joel Rubinson, one of my favorite authorities in the field,  posted this on Google+ ”as I review materials for the NYU social media class I am about to teach, I believe that Facebook will lead to the end of demographic targeting for media. Of course, content consumption and sharing behavior also enable this but Facebook will be the catalyst. Why not target on interests and actions? Thoughts?”

Most companies of any size use online survey techniques in an attempt to engage their customers, but the method does not support discovery of customer perspective; it validates assumptions of the company based on questions posed and deemed important. Again, the primary driver of survey method popularity is not the quality of the output and ability to provide better market intelligence, but the cost of implementation. I would suggest there are better alternatives today to learn unbiased market segment knowledge in applications of Opinion Mining technology to unsolicited customer-generated content.

The Opinion Mining approach offers much better quality of market segment intelligence and often rivals Survey approach in terms of implementation complexity and cost. I would like to offer an example to illustrate my point. Let’s look at tablets market segment defined by a few popular products in this category; however, non-like products that compete for the same wallet share can be used to get valuable insights:

• Apple iPad2 (666 customer “stories”)
• Blackberry Playbook (255)
• HP TouchPad (650)
• Motorola Xoom (576)
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 inch and (502)
• Toshiba Thrive (433)

These products were selected based on their popularity that manifested itself in a number of their customer-generated content references available online in a form of customer reviews, forum comments or social networks product page messages.

The first level of Customer Intelligence gained by Opinion Mining of this customer content is a list of customer experience attributes, sorted by their importance. The importance is measured as a percentage of total number of unsolicited opinions expressed by the customers. This answers the questions – WHAT is important to the customers and HOW important that is.

The next level allows the measuring of the difference between customer expectations and their experience and measures HOW well the customers’ needs are met. We use a two-point scale to visualize that difference (0=unacceptable, 1=experience meets expectations, 2=delighted); however, the measurements can easily be converted to any scale of choice without losing their meaning or accuracy. The chart below focuses on the top four attributes of customer experience by their importance to illustrate the approach.

There are practical implications of these measurements as they reflect on marcom messaging that have created customer expectations the product needs to meet. In the example above, most of the products exceeded the expectations of their customers in attributes most important to them by a significant margin. As an illustration, I would suggest that perhaps messaging about usability of these products could leverage customer sentiment to assure consumers who are hesitant to make a purchase and increase their products market adoption. That calls for a next level of intelligence that provides an answer to WHY customers feel this way and provide a context in which they express their opinions.

Above is a very small sample to illustrate the use of words and expressions (in square brackets) people to describe their opinions, and how they are attributed to a specific element of customer experience. These words, expressions ad even quotes can be used to fortify marketing messaging. Think of the very successful marketing campaign by Tempur-Pedic.

The flip side of the coin – early understanding of root causes of customer disappointment – can help to alleviate larger problems, turn the problem situation around or even present an opportunity for differentiation as illustrated below.

Looking deeper reveals a lot of unhappiness about compatibility:

And even deeper analysis will provide a context that is invaluable for taking an advantage of the opportunity (click on the image below to make it larger):

To sum it up – this type of market intelligence can be produced within a few hours at cost of a few hundred dollars without any installation, implementation or training investment which makes it difficult to ignore as an alternative or addition to survey and panels approach. As GPS technology thought us – multiplicity of signal sources results in better decision quality.

This analysis is based on 30,670 customer reviews of 108 tablets published online by December 24th 2011.

To insure statistical representation and accuracy of results, we have focused on 18 tablets that were reviewed at least 100 times this year. That may mean that some tablets that were introduced toward the end of the year did not qualify for this report.

We have studied before the correlation between number of reviews published online and a number of units shipped, and therefore found it important to use it for comparison.

The most customer-reviewed tablet of 2011 are Amazon Kindle Fire (3,572), Apple iPad 1 and 2 (2,302 combined) and HP TouchPad (970).

Amazon Kindle Fire announcement dominated media and not surprisingly received a disproportional number of customer feedback after it was released.  It’s value proposition and content availability are highly anticipated to make long expected dent in iPad market supremacy. The number of reviews seem to predict that this is the case.

Even though Kindle Fire OS is build on the Android platform, it has sufficient proprietary layer to view it separately from a more common versions.

From the date of TouchPad introduction the WebOS customers were the most satisfied lot (1.39) and the uncertainty about its future does not seem to extinguish their enthusiasm. Apple iPad customers are very close behind at (1.35). It is interesting to note that iPad 2 version of iOS have substantially improved its overall average satisfaction score.

The Kindle Fire OS experience score falls 0.03 points behind the Android, which is well within the margin of error, while both somewhat exceeded their customers’ expectations.

Our Market Intelligence Analysis of the tablet segment indicates that the following attributes of customer experience are most important to them:

1. Usability – 11.45% of all opinions expressed
2. Reliability – 9.45% of all opinions expressed
3. Price – 3.21% of all opinions expressed
4. Screen – 2.89% of all opinions expressed
5. Sound Quality – 2.52% of all opinions expressed
6. Compact Size – 2.10% of all opinions expressed
7. Screen Size – 1.70% of all opinions expressed
8. Battery Life – 1.63% of all opinions expressed
9. Customer Support – 1.40% of all opinions expressed
10. Operating System – 0.95% of all opinions expressed

You can get more detailed explanation of Attributes and Importance by watching this short video.

In terms of overall satisfaction, Samsung Galaxy tablet (7″) has earned the top customer satisfaction rating (1.53) and Huawei Ideo 7 tablet (1.50) came within a statistical tie, while Archos 7 Home tablet (0.82) and Velocity Micro Cruz tablet (0.95) are on the very bottom of the list.

To get more specific insights into the dynamics of the tablet customer perceptions, we sampled a market segment by analyzing the most experienced (i.e., most reviewed) models representing different operating systems.

1. Amazon Kindle Fire – 3,572 customers
2. Apple iPad 2 – 999 customers
3. RIM Blackberry Playbook – 281 customers
4. HP TouchPad – 970 customers
5. Motorola Xoom – 588 customers
6. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 inch – 615 customers

More details and customer feedback verbatim are available via access to the dynamic dashboard for this segment on request. Watch this video for navigation tips.

This analysis is based on 82,620 customer reviews of 318 smart phones published online by December 15th 2011.

To insure statistical representation and accuracy of results, we have focused on 42 smart phones that were reviewed at least 100 times this year. That may mean that some phones that were introduced toward the end of the year did not qualify for this report.

We have studied before the correlation between number of reviews published online and a number of units shipped, and therefore found it important to use it for comparison.

The most customer-reviewed phones of 2011 are HTC Thunderbolt (5,579), Apple iPhone 4-16GB (4,106) and LG Ally (2,514).

HTC got a hold on the position of the most reviewed brand in the smart phones category largely based on popularity of the Thunderbolt.

The customer’s enthusiasm for Android smart phones and the availability of a large number of models from multiple brands produced very unbalanced distribution of  reviews (75%).  

However, the Android OS enthusiasm did not translate into customer satisfaction lead as Windows phone customers’ expectations were exceeded by their experience with a wider margin. One of the possible reasons is the relatively weaker support of Android by the developer’s community that translates into the availability of applications.

It appears that Nokia’s decision to migrate their phones to Window OS is a wise one considering Symbian satisfaction scores.

Our Market Intelligence Analysis of the smart phone segment indicates that the following Attributes of customer experience are most important to them:

1. Reliability – 14.76% of all opinions expressed
2. Usability – 7.23% of all opinions expressed
3. Battery Life – 6.42% of all opinions expressed
4. Display – 5.82% of all opinions expressed
5. Camera & Video – 4.91% of all opinions expressed
6. Reception/Call Quality – 2.57% of all opinions expressed
7. Customer Support – 2.27% of all opinions expressed
8. Keyboard – 2.27% of all opinions expressed
9. Design (style) – 1.57% of all opinions expressed
10. Price – 1.23% of all opinions expressed
11. Music Player – 1.00% of all opinions expressed

In terms of overall satisfaction, Blackberry Style 9670 has earned the top customer satisfaction rating (1.60) and HTC Rhyme (1.59) came within a statistical tie, while Motorola Citrus (0.72) and Droid 2 Global (0.82) are on the very bottom of the list.

To get more specific insights into the dynamics of the smart phone customer perceptions, we sampled a market segment by analyzing the most experienced (i.e., most reviewed) models representing different operating systems. We picked the models that are close to each other in a number of customer reports to make it more comparable.

1. Apple iPhone 4S – 542 customers
2. Blackberry Torch 9800 – 550 customers
3. HTC Trophy – 236 customers
4. Nokia N8 – 523 customers
5. Samsung Continuum Galaxy S – 444 customers

More details and customer feedback verbatim are available via access to the dynamic dashboard for this segment on request.

How come there often seems to be no direct connection between the things we choose to measure and the goals we are hoping to achieve? Here are a few examples:

• If a company management’s goal is a sustainable long-term growth, why do they measure their decisions based on IRR (Internal Rate of Return)? The metric is useful for measuring a transaction, but it can likely lead to an ultimate distraction of an enterprise vitality if applied to strategic decision making.

• If a Customer Service organization’s goal is Customer Satisfaction, why do we measure performance of the employees based on how quickly they complete a call with a customer? Driving down the cost of customer interaction is a meaningful operational metric, but there is no profitability if customers abandon your operation.

• If an ultimate goal for Product Marketing is demand generation, wouldn’t it be critical to measure why customers buy your product? “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling him,” as Peter Drucker said.

According to Clayton Christensen, a professor in Harvard Business School and brilliant scholar of Innovation, the root of this problem is the quality of education offered in our business schools. He makes a great point illustrating how wrong choice of key metrics leads to deconstruction of enterprises and entire industries. Clayton is famous for his efforts to re-focus marketing “a job customers hire products to do” as opposed to product’s specs.

As consumers, we all know that our experience with “products” depends on many factors that are not connected to or even correlated with its specifications, functions and features. Quite often customers are more influenced by how easy it is to deal with the supplier or how reliably a product performs, or how simply and consistently it delivers the outcome we require. Yet when we try to measure customer satisfaction, we ask them to score their opinions about characteristics of the product itself. I do appreciate the elegant simplicity of NPS (Net Promoter Score) methodology and its well-documented correlation with profitability, but what specific action can it suggest to a product manager whose product earns a low score?

Steve Blank, Silicon Valley entrepreneurial marketing genius and the author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany book, seconds Christensen’s opinion about the quality of our business schools and is working on the development of an alternative curriculum that is focused on customer development as opposed to financial engineering. Blank is preaching the importance of customer involvement into a product development that appears to be a no-brainer to me, but apparently is a relatively challenging concept to most marketing professionals according to Kristin Zhivago.

The choice of measurements we make has a dramatic influence on the probability of a startup success, according to Eric Ries—a creator of the Lean Startup movement—who has very interesting thoughts on creativity and innovation. Eric thinks that we prefer to use “vanity” metrics that make us feel good instead of helping us to make quality decisions.

So it appears that according to the experts, institutional indoctrination and lack of intellectual honesty are two major reasons for the gap between organizational goals and performance measurements that negatively affect our probability to succeed in business.

I would like to suggest that our compensation system methodology is the third leg of this proverbial stool. Since a majority of the workforce is not compensated for producing results aligned with a long term goals of organizations they work for, we instead end up measuring what is easy to measure and makes us look good.

The Kindle seem to make a lot of its customers quite happy and they keep publishing their reviews in the record numbers – over 115 per day, every day since Amazon started its shipping. If this flood continues, it will outsell the current Tablet segment champion – iPad 2, our research shows that a number of customer reviews correlates to a number of units sold.

Below is the chart from a Market Intelligence Analysis dashboard that compares the two contenders by satisfaction with attributes of customer experience that are important to the customers. Click on the image to make it larger.

You can find explanation of Attributes concept in this short video

We are proud to announce the a new release of Opinion Mining software is now available to our customers and registered users. The release includes the following functions, features and enhancements:

• New format of Customer Intelligence analysis report along with short videos to help quick adoption

• New pages on our website describing how our customers using Customer Feedback Analysis to outsell their competition.

• New Trending report

I would like to thank our customers who provided valuable feedback that helped us develop these new capabilities.