The Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter was released into Public Beta about twenty days ago, and more than few of you made some very good suggestions for improvement of our overall user experience.

Today we released a version of the home page that includes some of the suggested design improvements. Hopefully we heard you correctly and made it better. In either case, please let us know. In the meantime we’ll continue to work on making PRMIR more useful.

You have probably seen examples of data produced from our database using our PRMIR v1.1 in the previous posts of this blog. Well, now you can take it for a free 5-day test drive. There are a few more examples of the use cases at this site.

We are currently monitoring the reputations of over 14,000 Consumer Electronics and Computer products in about 300 categories. Our database is growing at the rate of 25% per month, however there is a lot of work left to do in improving our algorithms to achieve a more accurate distribution of products into proper categories, and enable our data acquisition to harvest information at a higher performance rate. The accuracy of the scores is already pretty accurate and the consistency of interpretation allows for meaningful analysis of market segments.

Please let me now how this service can be improved from your perspective.

Product information, broadcasted via different methods and encountered by different means, is processed by potential buyers and creates certain expectations in our minds.

Functionality:

There are multiple “channels” by which an interest in buying a product creeps into our mind, but it is often a desire to experience functions and features of this product, and a promise of making our lives better, that makes us consider to part with our money. Hence if our expectations are not met by actual product experience, we often feel cheated and express dissatisfaction with the product. Sometimes it’s caused by actual and intentional misrepresentation of a product’s functionality, but more often it is misinterpretation of marketing messages associated with the product by a Customer.

Reliability:

No person decides to purchase a product expecting it to be “dead on arrival”, but it happens more often than you think. There is no way to know what is the expectation of every Customer for longevity of a product, but I can bet  that at a minimum it is at least 1 day longer that the length of the product’s warranty.  However, longevity is only one parameter of the Customer Reliability expectation. The other one is availability of the product for use or experience. Consider an example where a product breaks (i.e. is not available for use) during its reasonable life expectancy, and the Customer has to send it in for replacement or repair. Even more troubling are the instances when the loss of use is accompanied by associated damages or losses of perishable products, data, reputation or business opportunities, etc.

I consider Reliability reputation the single most important factor in my personal purchasing decisions as a failure to consider it very carefully can result in the most damage and unhappiness.

Support:

While there are ambiguities of Customer misinterpretations of Functionality messages, and a factor of Customer inexperience that may lead to negative Reliability experiences, there is no excuse for creating negative Support experiences. A Customer, rightfully, expects delivery at the stated time, respect for promised exchange and refund policies, and most importantly knowledgeable help from people who are genuinely interested in helping out. Unfortunately many companies treat Customer Support as the cost factor to be reduced, instead of an opportunity to learn and correct potential shortcomings in the product’s design and its messaging. This unwise strategy leads to commoditization of their markets, destruction of their brand value and profit margins as the Customer starts to look at their products as “disposable”.

Reputation is one of the most valuable assets of any company – It takes significant time and effort to build a good reputation.  Great company reputation provides an opportunity for higher profit margins, as trust in your product improves, and allows less discounting and advertising expense compared to less reputable competition.

Higher sales becomes a result of Confidence in your product’s quality, reliability and support – as opposed to its price.

The only way to build Reputation is to provide your Customers with Experiences that consistently exceed their Expectations.

I took almost a month to recover from my CES2010 and now I can attempt to write something more or less cohesive. The experience was absolutely overwhelming. Bright images on gigantic screens and loud sounds continuously blasting away are to be expected at Consumer Electronics trade show, but my mind could not function very well in these conditions.  I have not visited such large, noisy and heavily attended events for a few years and the assault on my senses was very difficult to bear, but I managed.

We are a new associate member of the Consumer Electronics Association and this was my very first visit to this event. CEA offers a terrific Mentoring program to its members and I came to Las Vegas to take advantage of it. It is amazing how much one can learn from truly knowledgeable and generous people even during a short personal meeting. I am very grateful to Bill Matthies of Coyote Insight for sharing his deep knowledge and understanding of the marketplace. I started this company with an idea of converting virgin data into actionable information, and we have almost succeeded – Bill made me realize that the link between our metrics and an action is very obvious to nobody but me, and advised to share that link with others using “stories” and “pictures” like this:

PRMIR – Deviation of Reliability Reputation scores for the Docking Station Product Category

Robert Heiblim of BlueSalve and my CEA Mentor, helped me understand the inter-workings of the CE community better and to meet people in CE product marketing to learn more about how they go about conducting their business. I only wish I could get more of Robert’s guidance and advice.

I need more examples of business processes where product managers have to “translate” data into “information” that suggest action.

Consider the actions a marketing product manager can take based on the data that their product ABC has a low satisfaction score. I can’t think of any other action than to learn more, i.e. to discover more data. Presumably information is created when our marketing product manager (or product marketing manager) compares ABC’s product satisfaction score with the one of a competing product, hence comparison of two points produce information, i.e. higher value.

Correlating the information produced by tracking these two data points over time with sales numbers can create knowledge – “product with an inferior reputation tends to undersell its competition by X%, when sold at competitive (i.e. similar) price”. Now, this is an actionable piece of knowledge as our MP/PM manager can attempt to discount the ABC product to stimulate sales or attempt to improve the customer’s opinion about it.

Can you suggest any scenarios where aggregated customer feedback about reliability of a product XYZ can lead to/suggest an action that protects and/or improves its profit margin? Your help will be deeply appreciated.

This time I played out a different scenario. It is quite common that customers of the products with high reputation for reliability, do not have much to say about support. It is understandable as they have no reason to experience Support Organizations. So I applied an unusual combination of filters to expose very popular and reliable products with negative customer experiences of Support.
This report helps to focus and to research root causes of problem by quickly exposing negative sentiment reviews about support.
I have used the following filters:
Product Reviews>50
CSI>1
PFS>1
PRS>1
PSS>1

Webcams that earned high reputation from their users, but have Support issues

Here are the resulting report