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.

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 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.

Tablet’ Market Segment update

The last month was full of action if you follow the tablets market segment. HP first started the price discounting to “gain market share” and then dropped the “bomb” of discontinuing the TouchPad they introduced only 42 days before. The judgment is still out whether we witnessed results of really agile decision making or an example of exceptionally bad corporate self-distraction. The initial stock market reaction seems to support the latter hypothesis, and current history of HP boardroom soap opera episodes provides enough clues. The new CEO apparently wants the company out of consumer products businesses.

There is an update – It appears the decision produced a shark bait effect and caused a number of class action suites on behalf of shareholders.

In this installment of online market research update, I would like to explain the process we follow to generate these reports.

We start at the Product Reputation screen and enter name/model of a tablet and click the “Submit” button. When the metrics for the entered tablet show up on the right side of the screen, we click on the “Compare with other products” button to expose all tablets in our database.

At this date, we monitor customer generated content for 32 tablets and the Market Intelligence report will show their reputation which is calculated by processing the text of customer reviews with our opinion mining software. Keep in mind that no questions were asked about their experiences and no customer was ever contacted by us to solicit their opinions. Surveys are not our business!

We use the “Customize your report” button to select only the tablets that were updated (new customer reviews were published online) within the last 30 days and have greater than 25 customer reviews published. The total number of reviews analyzed is 9,003. The result of the customization is displayed below. Please note that the metrics are calculated on all aggregated reviews published by the customers from the time a tablet became available for purchase.

We export the CSV file and generate WoM (Word of Mouth) Share chart and Trend based on the exported data. Not surprisingly, Apple iPad earns the largest share of customer feedback at 17%, although the number is much smaller than its market share and substantially dropped from 35% only two months ago.

To discover what attributes of their customers’ experience are important, to measure how important these attributes are to the customers, and what the difference between their expectations and their experiences with each attribute is, we focus on five of the most reviewed tablets for a more detailed Customer Intelligence Analysis.

We use a two-point scale to visualize that difference.

0=unacceptable / 1=experience meets expectations / 2=delighted

Customers “say” that Usability (11.64%), Reliability (11.32%), Quality of Construction (9.5%) and Display (5.4%) are the most important attributes of their experience with the tablets. While all participants are providing Usability experience well above their customer’s expectations, HP TouchPad and Apple iPad 2 are the leaders in this category. Motorola and Toshiba are considered the most “reliable” tablets by their customers, while Samsung Tab continues to struggle.

Here is the access to the tablets’ online marketing research dashboard that allows to see actual customer’s feedback if you click on a specific bar.

The last chart I would like to offer depicts customer affinity for tablet’s operating system and despite all brouhaha about the TouchPad, WebOS still earns the highest score from its customers.

Category Management Report Tablet’ Brands Word of Mouth Assessment (July 1, 2011)

This information is based on analysis of 6,413 customer reviews published online on or before July 1, 2011 on popular websites like Amazon, Best Buy and Cnet.com.

Only customer’s generated content (Customer Word of Mouth) is analyzed. Consumers’ opinions, without ownership reference, are not part of this online marketing research. The customer generated content was located, authenticated, de-duped and aggregated for the analysis.

There is significant difference in volume of customer feedback available for online marketing research of various brands as illustrated on the chart below.

Changes in Customer perceptions over time

HP TouchPad Tablet was introduced just a few days ago with an enthusiastic number of reviews and remarkably high Customer Satisfaction score. However it is not appearing on the Trending charts above because there is no sufficient history yet to plot.

Trend – It appears that the tablets with proprietary operating systems outperform Android counterparts, in terms of Customer Satisfaction, as they come to the market. See the chart below.

Please follow the links to HP Touchdown, RIM PlayBook, and Motorola Xoom,  verbatim if you want to read what the customers say about their experiences.

For more detailed analysis, please request Customer Intelligence Analysis for specific segment of this category.

The discussions on importance of innovation are all over Social Media. The calls for innovating ourselves out from the current economic malaise are coming from the President of Consumer Electronics Association to the President of the United States. In the words of Louis XIV (or was it Mel Brooks?) – “It’s good to be the King!” – for the rest of us it would be helpful to put some definitions around these terms. I do not pretend to be an expert on the subject of innovation, but I like to be specific and want to offer some ideas for discussion.

So what differentiate commercially successful product or service from the innovation?

I would like to propose that successful products gain market traction, meet their sales forecasts and generate anticipated profit margins.  Innovative products re-shape the market place, create new categories, and generate blockbusting profits. Innovative products successfully defeat the competitors’ assaults for long periods of time.

Development and introduction of successful products or services is a very challenging and risky endeavor, as we are well aware.

The Recent Portfolio Management Benchmark Survey sponsored by Planview, reported that only 52.3% of products meet with commercial success, while 21.2% were “killed prior to launch”.  They did not specify the type of products or industries covered by this survey, but my personal experience pegs the success ratio well under 40% mark.

The risk level for innovation is even higher. It is estimated that only 1 out 3,000 new innovative ideas becomes a commercial success. We also know that most innovative products rarely have anything to do with technological inventions, but have everything to do with the scale of market adoption. Peter Dreker, the father of modern Management Science, wrote in his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”, that a 15 year “gestation” period is the average time observed between the time of an original invention and the time of its commercial realization.

We all know examples of such innovations as Ford T, Microsoft Word, iPod and iPad to name a few that dominated and still dominate their product categories. These are very different products, however the thought process, methods and techniques of the people who are behind the creation of these products, are a mystery we want to discover.

I would like to propose that the key difference between really good Product Managers and the Innovators is in a way they perceive and understand the markets they target.

While a Product Manager segments the markets in terms of demographics or personae for which they develop a product, an Innovator is focused on the Customer Experience of people, who struggle to use existing products to do their chores, and interprets these struggles into the definition of innovative vision for new generation products.

In other words they concentrate on improvement of EXPERIENCE as oppose to improvement of a PRODUCT.

It appears Digital Media receivers keep on selling well and more consumers are considering to cut off the cable for their entertainment needs. We have published results of Voice of Customer analysis six months ago and it is still one of the most visited posts on this blog. The comments are also keep coming, and the one sent yesterday caused me to write this update.

This time we used Opinion Miner® software to discover:

• WHAT attributes of their customer experience are important – based on the stories and reviews these customers published on-line;
• HOW important are these attributes to them – based on the percentage of opinions expressed about an attribute compared to total opinions expressed;
• MEASUREMENTS of a difference between customers expectations and their experience for each attribute. It is expressed in a two points scale from “0″ (unacceptable) to “2″ (delighted) with “1″ that can be interpreted as 100% satisfied (expectation=experience).

We selected the following DMR’s, listed alphabetically, for this customer feedback analysis:

1. Apple TV 2010 (593 customer reviews)
2. D-Link Boxee Box (425 customer reviews)
3. Logitech Revue (367 customer reviews)
4. Roku XDS Streaming Streaming Player (1,186 customer reviews)

The number of opinions expressed by these products’ customer reviews does not match, and usually exceeds by a wide margin, the total number of customer reviews, as our software often extracts multiple opinions from a single customer story.

Keep in mind that no questions were asked about their experiences and no customer was ever contacted by us to solicit their opinions.  Surveys is not our business!

Our customer feedback analysis shows that Reliability is the most important attribute of customer experience for Digital Media Receivers, as 16.79% of all opinions expressed were focused on it. Unfortunately Boxee Box disappointed substantial number of their customers by shipping defective units, connectivity problems and firmware related stability issues. The details are available on request free of charge*. Reliability problems often put pressure on Support organizations and the D-Link customer support experience have also earned negative ratings from their customers. Apple TV and Roku reviews have generated below expectations score as well for the Support with comments like these

The CustomerSpeak! sample is from Roku reviews

Usability is the second most important attribute of customer experience with 10.96% of all opinions expressed. All analyzed products delighted their customers with their usability experience.

Please click on the chart above to enlarge the image.

All of the analyzed DMR’s are very easy to set-up according to their customers, but Roku’s customers feel that they got the best value as the XDS Streaming player Price attribute has the highest score of 1.24.

* Please specify DMR product when request for detail information

Last week we focused at customers’ perception of Operating System for tablets they purchased. These metrics are extracted from 1,352 customer generated content pieces published on-line  on or before June 15th, 2011 using Opinion Miner software.

The difference between customer expectations and their experience is measured from 0 to 2, where 1 represent a point of experience matches expectations and can be interpreted as 1=100% satisfaction.

The importance indicates a percentage of opinions about this Attribute weighted against the sum of all opinions expressed about the analized set of products. Considering the ratio of customer reviews published on-line against the number of units sold, any Attribute that carries importance over 1% may be experienced by tens of thousands of customers.

— CustomerSpeak! —

Android customers are also quite happy with their purchasing decisions depending on the version supplied with their tablet, while iOS do not have anything specific to say on the subject.

The Playbook introduction caused a lot of controversy well before it was actually released with speculations about its battery life problems wildly spread all over internet. The decision to go with its proprietary operating system was also met with a lot of criticism in social media. However since the Playbook started shipping and customers had a chance to form their own opinion, the results of their opinions analysis did not produce a crystal clear picture yet.  One thing seems to emerge though – it is a lot better product than most people have expected.  This writing is based on the analysis of 886 customer reviews of their experience with these tablets.

Below is a screenshot of the dashboard with a subset of attributes that are most important to customers (statistically determined). The bars represent measurements of the difference between customer expectations and there experience with each attribute.

It appears that Battery life issue was either blown out of proportions by pre-release speculations, or miraculously corrected by RIM engineers before the product started shipping, as the Playbook customers report that it exceeded their expectations by 21%.

QNX operating system appears to be a big hit with the customers as it exceeded their expectations by 35% and scored at much higher customer perception levels than iOS and Android.

What is surprising that overall general satisfaction score from the Playbook customers is quite low in spite the fact the most of the important attribute’s scores are positive.  When I clicked on the general satisfaction bar of the Playbook, the negative opinion snippets (customer insight) was focused around the lack of content and applications for the device.

Last year’s explosion of the tablet’s market still makes many industry analysts and forecasters dizzy, but the consensus of opinions seem to be, that iPad “owns” the segment with shipping and sold-through numbers.

RBC Capital Markets expects tablet market to reach 185 million units in calendar 2014, up 83 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 17 million in calendar 2010. RBC Capital forecasts global tablet revenue to increase from $11 billion in calendar 2010 to nearly $70 billion in calendar 2014.

In another article somewhat similar numbers were quoted

IDC found that almost 18 million tablets shipped worldwide in 2010–with Apple nabbing 83 percent of the market, which would come out to around 14.9 million tablets shipped.

Although IDC was relying on shipment figures and not actual sales to customers, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did specify sales figures at the iPad 2 unveiling earlier this month. He revealed that Apple sold 15 million iPads to customers in 2010.

For its part, Samsung reportedly shipped about 2 million Galaxy Tab units through 2010, but the actual sell-through to consumers was much lower. One month after its introduction, the company confirmed that they sold 1M units.

However I could not find any reports or even estimates for shipping or sold numbers of any other tablet that is currently on the market, I did see a lot of inquiries though.

For a long time I was interested in the correlation between numbers of products (units) sold and numbers of customer reviews for the product posted online and here I attempt to connect those dots.

Our aggregation algorithms found 1,299 customer reviews for Apple iPad and 294 customer reviews for Samsung Galaxy Tab. Average effectiveness of our algorithms was measured at 87%, in other words they find on average 87 online customer reviews out of 100 that can be found by a skilled, internet savvy research analyst. By applying 13% correction to the number of customer reviews found, and dividing the result by a number of iPads sold we can estimate that Apple had to sell just over 10,000 units to generate just 1 customer review (10,151). The calculations of these ratios for Samsung Galaxy Tab and other Consumer Electronics products produce very consistent results averaging around 0.014%. I did a similar analysis for flat screen TV products a few months ago.

I suggest that there are two practical implications that come out of this reasoning:

1.      The average review/product ratios could be used to estimate numbers of products sold in circumstances where such information is not disclosed by a company;

2.      The statistical significance of an issue or a benefit, reported by customer in their reviews is dramatically amplified when you consider the low percentage of customers who volunteer such information for public benefit.

Using the above mentioned logic I can offer a rough estimate of sales numbers for other, reasonably popular, tablets currently being sold.

To complete the picture I ran our Opinion Miner software on this data set to produce Customer Intelligence for these products. The result below shows a subset of these product’s attributes that are the most important to their customers, along with measurements of difference between customers expectations and their experience for each attribute. Click on the image to enlarge it.