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.

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.

Meaning: from  the many, one. The following illustrates how many voices can come together via social networking and the internet to help us spend our money more wisely.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist says in this interview:

“Posting information about products and experiences as everyday as hotel stays (”Generally all my reports are shower-related,” he said) helps other people make more educated purchases, he said during a panel session Tuesday, and can ultimately lead to better customer service when large numbers of people weigh in on social-media forums. Participating in these sites is an act of compassion, in some sense patriotism.”

Think back to your last “pig in a poke” purchase or “Hotel from Hell” experience. What would you give to have had someone spare you that? We all tell our friends our good and bad experiences in the marketplace. Now with social networking our “friends” can be like friends squared, we have the ability to reach the full six degrees of separation (just about anyone who has an internet connection) and share information. I agree with him that the numbers have to be large for it to really work and your idea of a great laptop and mine may vary due to what we want or require from it. Each reviewer contributes a piece of the puzzle to give shoppers a better picture of the product or service.

While it is often our own current economic woes that are making us choose more carefully where we spend our dollars, it is also the “green” thing to do. There is a lot of waste in the process of returns, and many products, particularly electronics, are not disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. In the end, the manufacturers and retailers include that cost of returns into the purchase price of their products. If we were able to choose more wisely, resulting in fewer returns, perhaps prices would reflect that. While my skepticism prevents me from holding my breath for that, (it could happen) I totally agree with Craig that it is a public service we can provide for one another and benefit from ourselves.

It seems words like “hope”, “change”, “renewal” help us to detach our actions from their inevitable consequences, at least in our own minds. At the turn of the New Year  we habitually make ourselves (and others) insincere promises to change, to start working out, to start learning languages or skills, to lose or gain weight, etc. We also like to make predictions nobody takes very seriously or calls us on.

Here is an example predicting the Death of Marketing

Gone are the days when marketers could carefully craft messaging and then broadcast that message in a few channels to huge portions of their audiences.  Oh, you can still spend money that way if you want to but in our transparent world, no marketing budget can possibly overcome the actual experience consumers have (and share with friends, followers and Google) with the product, service, or organization.  It no longer matters what you say;  in 2010, your brand will be more defined by what you do and who you are!

I wish Augie Ray, the author of this prediction and a new Forrester analyst, was right, but we both know that he is not. I am hoping that we will see consumers re-gain their power of choice and intelligent, rational selection and I believe that it has already started happening as reported by many observers. Here is an example from the Gerson Lehman Group quoting a McKinsey report:

“Two-thirds of the touch points during the active-evaluation phase involve consumer-driven activities such as Internet reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family” .

I just don’t believe that “it” will happen in 2010, primarily because the fundamental change is not an event, it is a process. A process that takes time and a lot of education as too many consumers have willfully relegated their power of choice and are more comfortable to see themselves as victims. Here is an example of a discussion “Does your Company’s Reputation Really Matter?” that illustrates my point:

Perhaps things will change if capitalism develops into a more socially equable system, or a new form of leadership evolves for the 21st century. In the meantime, what do you think? Is reputation still something to be valued and maintained? Does it really count for anything? And how do we ensure that our voices — customers, citizens, taxpayers — are heard amid the deafening noise of spin?

It is interesting to see a victim-hood mentality spilling over from Harvard Business Review by a “Leadership Coach”. I suppose if you don’t believe you have the power – you do not have it.

All the moaning, blaming everything in sight and somehow hoping for a better outcome, meanwhile continuing our patronage of those who don’t deserve it, is not going to bring any change for the better.

I rather do without many things I deem to be necessary – many are not. I stopped buying products that do not deserve high regard from customers who experienced them. I’d rather be without or pay more for quality if it is available. I have enough headaches, thank you very much. I stopped flying anywhere I can drive within a reasonable time, and I do a lot of my long distance meetings using technologies ranging from Skype to Cisco.

For the same reason you cannot change your weight without changing your diet, you cannot get the quality you deserve without demanding it — consistently. Change before you have to.

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

These 29 netbooks are selected from 98 available on the market and the result of sentiment analysis and opinion mining of 16,402 customer reviews.

I used the Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter with the following filters:

1. Number of Reviews per product >50
2. CSI >1
3. PFS>1
4. PRS>1
5. PSS>1

Netbooks that earned highest Product Reputation Scores

The resulting report can be seen here. The information can also be downloaded as a Excel file format to produce graphs, presentations and additional analysis.

I was watching TV and an Apple commercial came on mocking PCs and the Windows 7 Operating system, claiming that their machines are No1 in terms of Customer satisfaction. I decided to verify this claim using our Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter, still under construction.

I filtered out 3 laptops that enjoy the highest reputation in terms of Customer satisfaction out of 123 laptops in our data base, based on Customer Reviews, and the data suggests that Apple does in fact tell the truth. Congratulations Apple!

Customer Satisfaction is usually considered to fall into a domain of Market Research, to me however it is one of the most critical traits of CRM universe. After all Customer Relationship Management systems suppose to help you to know how your customers feel about your company, your service and your product at any given time. Therefore it is critically important to enable and optimize two ways communication channels for capturing and analyzing the resulting information flow.

“Unless the source of the statement (or comments) has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him. This applies, of course to matters of judgment. A book review, good or bad, can be far more descriptive of the reviewer than informational about the book itself. This (probabilistic) mechanism I also call Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the rule.”

The underscored words are mine.

“The information from an anonymous reader on Amazon.com is all about the person, while that of a qualified person, is going to be all about the book”

“Fooled by randomness – The hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

While completely agree with Mr. Taleb, I would like to pose that this is mostly accurate statement about general sentiment of liking or not liking a book or a product. The reference to disagreement of accuracy of specific fact stated in the book and questioned by the commenter, assumes certain expertise and therefore is about the book and not about the writer of the comment. The reference to specifics of the customer experience with a product also provides more practical information than reflection of commenter’s personality or expertise, and if it is consistent with experience of other customers , warrants further analysis, and perhaps corrective action.

Based on Wittgenstein’s ruler approach I would suggest that CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) is a relatively low value instrument which is like a thermometer, can point to the fact that your body is not well, but to none of potential reasons for that condition.

I wrote this story awhile ago, before we had this blog started, to eventually publish here.

It all started in August 2007, when I had to travel across the continent almost every week and started shopping for a lightweight laptop computer suitable for business travel.

While selecting parameters for my planned purchase in terms of specifications was not too difficult, if you know what you want, predicting the quality of your ownership experience may prove to be much more complicated. I’ve been an online shopper for a long time, but the recent cost of shipping and the hassle of dealing with less and less responsive customer service reps, started to outweigh the original savings and conveniences.  As a result I became much less impulsive with my online purchases – in this economy there is less money to spend and less time to waste, so I figured a small investment into initial research would be a good thing.

I found three major sources of information that were quite useful to assist me in making the choice:

1. Product specifications provided by the Original Equipment Manufacturer that are part of advertising and marketing collateral and designed to create our expectations of functionality and performance, but provide little help to gauge the probability of these expectations being met;
2. Editorial Reviews provided by magazine and online publishers that offer us a glimpse of potential user experiences which are quite valuable, but substantially removed from the regular consumer environment – the editors test carefully selected and tuned equipment provided at no cost to them by the OEM, and don’t have to deal with fulfillment, delivery and customer service issues. Unfortunately Consumers Reports did not review the laptops I was interested in and their recommendations were not available. A relatively quick tour of a few popular web sites helped me to create a short list of the two laptops that met my requirements;
3. Consumers (Users’) Reviews provided by actual purchasers of the product who share their personal experience and rate their satisfaction with this product. There is a relatively high probability that one will be very satisfied with a product that has been rated very highly by most reviewers. Adversely, you will do well avoiding products that are rated very low by most reviewers.

Two laptops that I had short-listed for purchase, based on product specifications and editorial reviews, had very similar reputation ratings of 3.5 stars out of 5, which is not perfect, but acceptable. So what is the next step? Toss a coin? Is it safe to assume that these two products have the same reputation and would be equally satisfying purchases?

It turns out that this would have been a very bad assumption.

Usually I lack in patience (those who know me, please stop laughing – “Good men know their limitations”), but this time I decided to assess whether the reasons, that prevented these laptop users from giving the highest satisfaction ratings of 5, are “showstoppers” for me, or not – we all have our own limits of tolerance to different experiences. I ended hunting for and reading through dozens, or sometimes hundreds of reviews and found out that the most negative experiences with laptop #1 were centered around overheating issues and resulting customer service hassles, where negative reports of laptop #2 were focused on order processing and fulfillment problems.

I had invested 8-10 hours of my time in research and spent $120 more than originally anticipated, to purchase the laptop #2 from an online retailer that had it in inventory, to bypass the fulfillment problem and have been enjoying my laptop without any reliability problems. I hear the laptop #1 OEM has finally found workarounds for the overheating problems and is now working to pacify many of their very vocal and unhappy customers.

As smug as I am about this experience, the efforts required to do such research require too much time and patience and I wondered how much easier it would be to have more meaningful product reputation ratings. So I looked, but could not find anything unbiased, consistent and verifiable to make it work for me. That is how my new project, Amplified Analytics was born. Please look around the site and let me know if it makes any sense to you. I would love to hear your experiences related to product reputations and user reviews.

As a shopper for an all-in-one printer, comparing these two printers below on a retail site, the Epson Workforce is the easy choice – as customers on Amazon rate it at 4 out of 5 stars as opposed to the HP printer at 2.5 stars out of 5. Given the similar price and supply availability, this decision is a “no brainer”.

However, as a product marketing manager, responsible for the HP C4280, I would really want to understand the nature of  its  failure to earn a better reputation with its customers, before giving up on it and returning to the drawing board for the next model.

From the graphic above, a screen shot of our V2P Accelerator, the most noticeable diversions in reputation for these two competitors are in Functionality and Support scores, while customers expressed disappointment with the Reliability of both machines.

45 of 83 reviews (54%) explicitly addressing the functionality of the HP printer, expressed a negative sentiment about it. What’s even more telling is the intensity of the sentiment expressed – these customers’ negative sentiment intensity is an average of 0.073 which is nearly unacceptable. My hypothesis is the HP marketing organization has created unattainable expectations through its marketing communications. Let’s look more closely at what is causing this uproar:

Many customers point at software compatibility issues. I will only quote reviews from those authors who have identified themselves.

“This product does not work with VISTA. Their software upgrade that is supposed to fix it also does not work. ” nitropolo13;

“This is printer is a money pit. It constantly prints documents in color, no matter how I configure the software.” mcduck_rules;

“The software does not work and is not fit for purpose. If you have more than one user on xp it will insist on installing multiple copies of printers, each time corrupting you initial installation requiring the lengthy install and uninstall.” andrewmanly2;

“the software keeps trying to reinstall itself repeatedly! I have to keep task manager open to keep stopping the installs.” lequiqui;

“The c4280 is an exercise in frustration, at least with Windows Vista. Vista keeps forgetting the printer and then HP reinstalls the printer automatically so you end up with multiple copies in your “Printers” list. Prepare to spend lots of time waiting for HP to reinstall the c4280 several times a week. Oh, and HP installs all kinds of software on your machine — just nothing to resolve this problem.” dtfroats;

The software issue is, statistically, the most acute cause of “pain” to customers. Product managers should be able to produce a downloadable “fix” to remedy the problem and if the availability of such a fix is well communicated to the HP support organization and to existing customers, the reputation of the printer could improve significantly. In my view this is a low hanging fruit – fixable, low cost of distribution and a very high impact on Product Functionality Reputation.

Reviews related to the HP’s Product Support damages this product’s reputation even further – 16% of all customer reviews explicitly complain about their support experience:

“Spent an entire day with HP tech help trying to get the drivers installed correctly and when I did get them installed the print options menu was incomplete — I spent another day dealing with HP on the phone — it’s as if I don’t have better things to do – by massthreat”

“HP’s customer service is a disgrace. – by robert_walsh@condenast.com”.

“HP tech support is non-existent, I have spoken with customer reps in Canada, Philippines, and India and none of these people have used the printer or have a clue about the problem. The web tech support is also useless.This is the last Hp product I will own. – mcduck_rules”.

“I spent over 6 hours on customer support to try and fix the problem and I was told it wasn’t fixable. I climbed the customer service ladder and was finally able to speak to an English speaking “Case Manager” who clearly told me that “. . scan functions on any printer have a tendency to malfunction for various reasons. .- by philbechtel

“I called HP – and they have the worst customer service department I’ve ever dealt with. I spent hours and hours on the phone with them, and all they knew how to do was read instructions out of a book. – by nbasile”

It is hard to come up with any specific conclusions except that the cost of supporting this printer must be horrendous. I would love to run our analysis engine over the transcripts of the service calls and the email communications to extract the roots of the problems and recommend possible solutions, but these transcripts are not available to us.

By the way it took me about 15 minutes to conduct this analysis using our V2P Accelerator.