This week we analyzed Customer Reviews for Computer Speakers. As of this date we monitor 136 products in this category and analyzed 10,265 reviews written by their customers. However some of these products have not accumulated enough reviews to produce statistically representative and accurate metrics, so we filtered them out of the competition. The second round disqualified any product that failed to meet Customer Expectations with its Functionality, Reliability or Support.
Logitech Z-3 Wood Grained 2.1 Speakers
2010 Piplzchoice Award winner
20.3% above average Customer Satisfaction in its Category
The winners are chosen by their customers
For full list of products in this category and Customer Reviews used for this research, select “Computers & Accessories > Computer Speakers ” Category in Product Reputation Market Intelligence Report.
Social media blogs and social networks of like-minded consumers and are not only reporting the latest buyer trends and behavior, they are subtly dictating a buyer’s choice. They publicize, for example, what customers can expect in current product features and services. This information acts like a “satisfaction driver” literally biasing the customer even before they go out to shop about the “must-be” parts of their purchases. If your product fails to provide what customers take for granted, your sales will drop and your product reputation will quickly suffer. Imagine that next blog posting that mentions your product’s features or support services in a negative way! You need to know what customers are saying about your product and your reputation.
Provide a venue and build a relationship
Is your product or brand associated with a social media website? A user forum? A company blog? Leverage the sense of anonymity an online forum offers. Encourage active participation with polls, surveys, and “The Most Burning Question?” submissions. When have you ever had the opportunity to so cost-effectively talk to a customer on a one-to-one basis? There is overhead in terms of administrative time but the benefits will more than likely outweigh the costs. If you offer and initially promise participation of management; keep your word! If someone posts a comment, make certain someone in authority quickly responds with more than just a robotic thank you. You don’t have to agree with comments but, you do have to prove you have read them!
Post surveys and polls about your product to encourage participation
Make certain you clearly state when and where results will be published. See if anyone is paying attention. When posting results of your surveys and polls, use the interest generated to ask visitors to respond to either another poll or a sign up email list. Give information before you ask for a name and an email address. Remember that negative criticism more often than not is more valuable than praise and fearless publishing it is a mark of transparency (good management) and character.
Grow your brand and tell people about it
Developing name and “brand” recognition by “spreading it horizontally” into collateral areas in your geographic community, on the websites and forums of colleagues AND competitors in your industry, and, most important, in your “virtual business niche”. Consider providing “expert”answers on public forums. Offer charitable donations both in your local physical world as well as in cyberspace. Charity builds your persona, your online reputation, and your brand recognition. Telling your customers about your charity is not blatant self-promotion; it can be a public announcement.
Last weekend we have passed another milestone – we are now monitoring product reputation of over 20,000 products and analyzed over 2,000,000 customer reviews.
The next few weeks will bring new functional releases as well as changes to the structure of our website that hopefully make it easier to use. Thank you for your feedback and recommendations.
This week we analyzed Customer Reviews for Point & Shoot 10 MP Digital Cameras. As of this date we monitor 765 products in the Digital Cameras category and analyzed 66,481 reviews written by their customers. However some of these products have not accumulated enough reviews to produce statistically representative and accurate metrics, so we filtered them out of the competition. The second round disqualified any product that failed to meet Customer Expectations with its Functionality, Reliability or Support.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS1 2010 Piplzchoice Award winner 7% above average Customer Satisfaction in its Category The winners are chosen by their customers
For full list of products in this category and Customer Reviews used for this research, select “Camera & Photo > Digital Cameras > Point & Shoot Digital Cameras” Category in Product Reputation Market Intelligence Report on this site.
The last night session on Social CRM left me very disappointed. The debate on whether SCRM is shiny, new dawn of new, social Enterprise or a infamous lipstick on the pig have been raging for a while. Until I’ve heard the comments and answers of the last night panel members (with honorable exclusion of Mint.com), I was very hopeful for the first. Not anymore.
CRM was certainly a very profitable business for a couple of decades now, and yet most people talk about it as a failure. I have written about the fact that CRM has never failed as a technology, but as a strategy, implementation, adoption, and as the result in delivering promised ROI. At the heart of it CRM promised Customer Relationship Management, but delivered customer relationship Management – efficiencies and cost cutting without effective execution of better Customer Experience. We tried to manage Customers, not to manage our relationships with the Customers.
So, what have we learned here? Judging by the communications and attitudes of the last night panelists (again excluding the Mint) – not much. New and improved SCRM would help Enterprise to manage PR risks, to corral Customers into company controlled forums, capture more personal information and otherwise continue on the same path of exploitive relationship management.
The fine metaphor of the bridge between the Social and The Enterprise morphed into the image of the gated community without a lot of transparency or accountability.
@jowyang asked me afterwards if a company can make money engaging in more balanced, fair, respectful relations with their customers. In my opinion it is the only way to build a truly great, profitable company with a focus on long term ROI growth, look at Zappos.
Social CRM – Putting Customers First – what does it even mean? Healthy relationship has to be equitable and “social” means that even in relatively free market society customers have a choice to have relationship with less abusive partners. The first law of Social is Authenticity and when a company starts to invest into quality of Customer Experience, with or without technology to support it, and then I’ll start buying into Social CRM. Please stop putting Customer first and concentrate instead on Customer Experience.
How can you maximize your stakeholders’ return on investment? Treat your stakeholders like your customers. What is really important to them? For example, is it just a return on investment or some sense of control? If they are sitting you in board room, your living room, or your office, then there is a strong possibility they are not just interested in the dollar amount annually reported on an IRS Form K-1! If they attend meetings, even just to earn a stipend, they want information.
Many online shoppers now use social media to make informed decisions about their purchases. Are your stakeholders any less discerning? Perhaps management should consider going beyond an annual report to decision-makers and integrate them into your operational rather than just strategic processes. Are “active” stakeholders in your product or services aware of what your customers “really” say about your products or do they receive summarized, massaged statistics that have a 4-figure precision? Have you noticed that with the emergence of a Global Village, there are now many self-appointed “town criers”? Social media forums and blogs provide the digital equivalent of a local village square. As a manager, do you have the resources to provide your stakeholders, assuming they are interested, with raw and timely “online buzz”? Can they “(with)stand the truth”?
A meaningful picture of key performance indicators (KPI) is not complete unless they are somehow linked to critical success factors (CSF); the two are very different but ultimately affect the same bottom line – stakeholder ROI! Defining a critical factor that will make a product successful doesn’t necessarily have to come from the boardroom or the Research and Development department. In today’s Global Village, a critical success factor more than likely comes from an unsolicited comment made in some public forum! Social media not only keeps Jane and John Customer informed but actually helps “must-have” features crystallize in their minds before they make their purchase. Failure to integrate “must-have” features into a product design is an obvious mistake that is relatively easy for a product manager to avoid. It takes however, an interaction between the identification of what is exciting and innovative today with tomorrow’s performance indicators to eventually achieve a product’s critical success.
Stakeholders have cultivated a very specific point of view – otherwise, by definition, they wouldn’t have the wealth, education, or power to be a stakeholder. Product managers similarly have a viewpoint, although it, again by definition, is very different from that of stakeholders. A synergy can arise however, if a third perspective, an aggregate measure of customer satisfaction, is added to the “product mix”. Customers want satisfaction; stakeholders want success; the two are fundamentally the same. The successful product manager can extract many actionable insights that ultimately translate into significant returns on investment from what customers’ and stakeholders’ want; they just need to know where to look for their solutions
This week we analyzed Customer Reviews for 52-inch Televisions. As of this date we monitor 472 products in the Televisions category and analyze 36,475 reviews written by their customers. However some of these products have not accumulated enough reviews to produce statistically representative and accurate metrics, so we filtered them out of the competition. The second round disqualified any product that failed to meet Customer Expectations with its Functionality, Reliability or Support.
Samsung LN52A630 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV 2010 Piplzchoice Award winner 9% above average Customer Satisfaction in its Category The winners are chosen by their customers
For full list of products in this category and Customer Reviews used for this research, select “Televisions & Video > Televisions” Category in Product Reputation Market Intelligence Report on this site.
Like serving borscht, an Eastern and Central European beetroot soup, it is best to consume market research, especially about customer relations, with a healthy dollop of creamy common sense. I recently had dinner with several close friends who happen to be marketing mavens and my business associates. I was quite surprised when what I had intended to be a lighthearted joke brought the four of us into passionate disagreement. I had been discussing an article written by a market research service and summarized my feelings in a simple sentiment – just because you lead a horse to water doesn’t mean you can make him drink TWICE from the same trough; he has to like what he is drinking for him to take a second sip.
Two of my friends immediately pounced; they joined together in a spontaneous lecture that reiterated market data from panels and focus groups about customer acquisition; lead generation through pipeline to close. They had research data that a behavioral psychologist would admire! Both my other friend and I told them that they missed the point – good marketing is about big-picture perceptions rather than a funnel-shaped sales process transitioning from an initial contact to counting sales receipts. Our point was that especially in today’s marketplace you must continually win a customer’s approval, you don’t acquire and hold them like so many shares of stock in an investment portfolio labeled “goodwill”.
Valued concepts of price, product, place, and promotion have undergone a paradigm shift. The emergence of the Internet has helped to democratize business. Mom and Pop businesses can compete on equal ground with multinational conglomerates now. In fact, the sales funnels now have even wider openings to suck in prospects. But “old-timers” often have difficulty recognizing paradigm shifts. What has democratized the Internet storefronts has also democratized Joe and Jane Customer! The sales process once defined by the Four P’s has been digitized and now, in virtual space, finds itself also democratized. In a medium that travels at the speed of light, digital word-of mouth and concepts, like online product or service reputation, rule. Market research points to growing amounts of consumer-generated media as determining customer choice, not to mention customer loyalty. Studies suggest consumers seek out this information before they make a purchase and consider it advice without bias or ulterior motive. You don’t “herd” people into funnels anymore; the savvy shopper more than likely “surfed the web” prior to “selecting” your product or service rather than you “acquired” them through place or promotion!
Besides all that, I reminded my friends that our thirsty horse doesn’t really show its “approval” until it returns the third time! The first sip was the test based on curiosity, the second was a test reaffirming the initial experience; but the third is not only reaffirmation but proof that the water reliably satisfies a need. Finicky horse? Not really. It’s an adaptive survival trait called “conditioned taste aversion” (also known as bait shyness or the Garcia effect). This apparently “hard-wired” behavior protects most mammals from too much of a novel “offering” (for example, poisoned bait) without testing its “safety (or reputation)” value over a short period of time. In truth, even though people do mimic a herd and sometimes even stampede, they are even smarter than horses! Your products, services, or business hasn’t ever really acquired your customers; your customers have chosen you! Reputation has always and will forever rule!
This week I committed a double SNAFU, so I would like to apologize and to make appropriate corrections. Our selection process for the award needs some improvements and cannot be relied exclusively on semantic definitions of categories. Remote controls category happen to contain devices for TV, garage openers and other applications that should not be considered as competing products. I apologize and will update the selection process for the next week.
This is the correction
This week we analyzed Customer Reviews for Remote Controls. As of this date we monitor 90 products in this category and analyze 12,772 reviews written by their customers; however some of these products have not accumulated enough reviews to produce statistically representative and accurate metrics, so we filtered them out of the competition. The second round disqualified any product that failed to meet Customer Expectations with its Reliability or Support.
URC RFS200 2010 Piplzchoice Award winner 29% above average Customer Satisfaction in its Category The winners are chosen by their customers
Say you’re a product manager responsible for a line of MP3 players. One of the players is not selling well, in spite of various promotional activities including two price reductions within the last six months. You still can’t find lift.
As with any product development cycle, you conducted focus groups and researched the market to determine the optimal feature set for your target audience, at a compelling price point. The research didn’t yield any unexpected or actionable results.
In addition to handling your regular workload, you have several hundred online customer reviews collected over the last 60 days to plow through. It’s vital to read these reviews but you simply don’t have the bandwidth to go over them all with an attention they require. You need an easy way to filter out relevant customer themes that provide quick, current, actionable insights from customers.
Competitive products offer almost the exact same features as your MP3 player at a similar price. You’re now working on a next- generation player but aren’t clear on what the “must have” features should be for this version. Not only is your market data ambiguous, but also it’s now stale after all this time.
Sound familiar?
Enter Amplified Analytics. Using AAI’s Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter (PRMIR), which is based on semantic analysis of customer reviews and behavioral economics models, product managers and key decision makers can quickly segregate and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) like Customer Satisfaction (CSI) with a product functionality, reliability and a quality of support.
Top category selections, such as MP3 players, on the PRMIR data entry screen are, easily identifiable and simple to find. Users can see the ratio of reviews to products, using a significant product sampling (in the case of the MP3 player, 75:1). All listings are date stamped, so that users know precisely when data has been updated. In just four mouse clicks, a product manager is able to generate meaningful functionality rates for his or her product;
The PRMIR interface allows customers to make multiple selections of competing manufacturers and filter the number of reviews and ranges for several performance indicators, including Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI), Product Functionality Score (PFS), Product Reliability Score (PRS) and Product Support Score (PSS).
When recalculating the CSI factoring out this specific design issue, the MP3 player in question outscores the competition by 4.2%. An up-to-date analysis with easily importable data is available in less than 15 minutes; the entire process takes less time than a normal lunch hour. Most important, stakeholders walk away with accurate data and tangible feedback to ensure customer satisfaction and profitability of future products.
