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.

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.

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.

We finally got enough customer feedback to see the evidence that iPhone 4S substantially improved customer experience compared to iPhone 4 models. Apple resolved antenna issues completely and as the result significantly improved reception/signal clarity. Customers love new keyboard experience and their usability satisfaction ratings are exceedingly high. The results are based on Opinion Mining of 4,489 Apple iPhone customers published online.

The image above highlights the attributes of customer’s experience most important to them as they have articulated in their feedback. No keywords were used during the analysis to identify these attributes, and no questions were asked to influence the answers, as surveys are not our business or part of our opinion mining methodology. Click on the image to enlarge it.

This morning, I had an interesting experience. Among many emails, tweets and webinar offerings, I managed to expose myself blindly to two that focused on one challenge I have to overcome the most – talking too much and listening too little. Interestingly enough, neither of the messages was specifically targeting individual or style shortcomings, and the subject line of these presentations was not about listening skills. If this is not a moment of serendipity, then I don’t know what is. BTW it also synch with my favorite definition of serendipity: “…is when you come to look for a needle in a stack of hay, and you end up finding a farmer’s daughter.”

The first piece of content is a video from http://www.entselling.com/ that talks about challenges of entrepreneurial selling and is not focused on the selling or listening style at all. It is very good and I strongly recommend it to any startup team, but the listening piece resonated with me the most. I’ve been trained on the importance of this skill for selling many years ago, and judging by my performance at the time, I have even learned to apply it. However, as it may be obvious to people who know me, it is not one of my natural qualities . The more I get excited about the subject of conversation, the less patient I get with listening to my conversation partners, particularly if I think I already figured out what they are trying to communicate.

I may be right about that, but it doesn’t create a great conversation experience, nor does it make them feel that they have been heard and that I actually do understand their concerns or problems I am proposing to address with my product or service. Apparently, it is a very common problem undermining many startup founders who are understandably excited about their creations to a detriment of their potential customers’ comfort, and subsequently a sales success. Maybe I should start looking for a startup founders “shut up and listen” support group. Please let me know if such a group exists.

The second piece is even more interesting and was presented by Rebel Brown at the Defy Gravity webinar sponsored by TreeHouseInteractive. Rebel is a very dynamic and passionate speaker, and she was talking about many marketers trying to use social media as traditional content broadcasting channel. The main lesson I took out of this presentation is about a challenge of institutionalized listening that needs to become a part of personalized conversation if a brand wants to be successful in social media. I suppose that no brand will be able to survive without social engagement with their customers, as the customers are creators of a brand.

“Advertising can help you sell good products, but only your customers can help you build a great Brand!”

The challenge is in learning what is important to your customers and communicating with them about this, as opposed to focusing on your product or your brand. I think the most difficult part is to not assume that we already know what it is, and not be afraid to learn from these communications.

Rebel also made a great point about the practice of counting followers and “likes” as a result of social media efforts. I will paraphrase it here as, “Do not confuse tactical metrics with actual meaningful results.” Let’s face it – these only exist because they are easy to count. Their relevance to business outcomes is very questionable, and the only thing they help to learn is how to manipulate or game the counting mechanisms.

I don’t think a “real” marketer can be helped by a mere support group or volunteer 12-step program. Perhaps there is an opportunity for a true “rehab.” All you need is a recovering marketing celebrity lending their name to this venture.

“You cannot manage what you cannot measure.” Those are well known and accepted words of wisdom that have been taught to thousands of MBA students for decades. There is a lesser popular truth though—that measuring wrong things can really hurt your business. Definition, selection and design of appropriate, balanced and concise metrics, as well as the processes for continuous delivery of these metrics, are the key management challenges for every organization.

1.      Focusing on the “wrong” metrics will create unintended results.

One of the more graphic examples of “wrong” metrics is a ratio of successful convictions, widely used to measure success or reputation of public prosecutors. This one causes US taxpayers to waste hundreds of millions of dollars in court costs, compensation for wrongful imprisonment and lost productivity every year. Essentially this metric is measuring a percentage of tried cases that result in conviction against the total number of cases tried by the prosecutor. The higher the percentage of convictions, the more “successful” the prosecutor is considered to be regardless of how well justice is served, how many lives are destroyed and how much financial damage is inflicted.

Another example is the evaluation of a Product Manager performance based on the attainment of product forecast goals. While I am familiar with a popular definition of a Product Manager’s role as a “Product CEO,” the organizational reality does not often support this definition, as product managers rarely have administrative authority to enforce their decisions and act mostly as influencers. It is intellectually dishonest to keep them accountable for a result of a sum of aggregated decisions made by a multitude of people, but most importantly it does not help to bring desired improvements in products performance.

2.      Focusing on unbalanced metrics will promote bad behavior.

Performance is often measured by a singular metric, yet people are rarely expected to behave one-dimensionally. Everyone knows that a lot of digressions will be forgiven to a salesman who consistently makes his quota, even though his lack of desire and/or skill to forecast costs your company serious hits to profit margin. Imagine it is the end of a quarter and you are deeply discounting your product in a desperate attempt to make your company revenue numbers, just to see your “best” performer bringing in a “bluebird” deal you had no visibility of. He just caused you to give away profits, and you did not need to sacrifice for “please sign today” deals. A secondary measurement attached to accuracy of forecast and associated with commission structure can dramatically improve a company’s profitability.

3.      Concise metrics promote action.

Conversely, the convoluted metrics are a waste of time, expense and opportunity. Many Customer Satisfaction measurements are falling into this category because they are often too general, and the best cause of action you may take is to do more studies. Most companies do not even consider competitive influences on their customer’s assessment of their satisfaction with their products or services. Unless feedback from customer analysis of every key component of customer experience is continuously conducted, and in relation to competitive options available to the customers, it is very difficult to figure out why overall Customer Satisfaction is moving higher or lower, who should take any action and what kind of action should be taken.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that any performance metric has to be evaluated in a holistic model as it is very easy to come up with a clever way to improve one aspect of a specific performance at a detriment of the long-term well-being of the company as a whole.

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.

This online market research, administered by Amplified Analytics, is valid as of August 5, 2011 and is the result of the review of different tablet brands’ segment of the market. It is based on the analysis of customer feedback from 8,241 tablet users who expressed their sentiments on the product.

The chart above depicts the Word of Mouth (WOM) Share for ten of the top tablet brands in terms of customer satisfaction (CSI).

The chart above illustrates shows customer satisfaction with Operating System of their respective Tablet.

The scores were algorithmically produced by the use of Opinion Mining software that conducts an analysis of customer feedback that is published online by the customers themselves; no customer was personally contacted to provide their opinions.  The relative percentages were not based on customer’s answers to biased survey questions. It is not Amplified Analytics’ business to conduct surveys.

It is also important to note that the Apple iPad2 was excluded from the list of tablet brands analyzed because it significantly dominates the market, thus making the comparison of customer satisfaction meaningless. The Apple brand seems to have its own market that is incomparable to others.

The chart below shows a comparison of specific attributes (reliability, portability, display, etc) of leading tablets. These attributes came from the customers when they shared their experience using the brands. The green line athwart denotes the relative importance of each attribute to customers. Check the methodology used in this link: Opinion Mining. Attributes with less than 1% importance were not included in the graph.

From the graph, we can see that Reliability is the most important attribute, with 11.7% of total opinions.

Yet, customers of Samsung Galaxy continue to get disappointed for the second month of measuring it since it was first introduced. Its Customer Support, with an importance rating of 1.76%, exceeds customer expectations by 8% while the Display attribute, with a 7.42% score, is on top of the competition.

You can access this dynamic Customer Intelligence dashboard by clicking on this link and CustomerSay! Verbatim by clicking on a specific bar of this chart. “Attributes” and “Products” selection windows allow for focus on your area of interest.

The tablets market segment is fun to watch. While there is no doubt that Apple “owns” the segment it is interesting to note that it has the lowest satisfaction score compared to the competition.

Given the enthusiasm of Apple fans and popularity of the original iPad, I wonder if the bar was set too high for many iPad 2 purchasers. Digging deeper into the details of Customer Experiences we can see that a lot of negative comments are focused on quality of the camera embedded into the tablet.

Indeed the “focused” listening provides specific metrics that show difference between customer expectations and their actual experience with this attribute of Customer Experience.

The analysis shows that Blackberry Playbook is a clear leader when it comes to Customer Experience with picture quality. Considering widely held belief (which I do not share) that Apple does not do market research it would be interesting to see if they address the camera/picture quality issue in the next edition of this popular product.

We used Opinion Miner® software to analyze 1,103 customer generated reviews, published online before May, 29 2011, of the tablets listed above to generate these findings. The scores are calculated to the two point scale from 0 (unacceptable) to 2 (delighted) with 1=100% satisfied (i.e. experience matches expectations).