Most company executives don’t think that their accounting department is in the Customer Experience business. True, very few members of financial management teams normally have a reason or opportunity to communicate directly with their company’s customers unless they have to chase accounts receivable problems.

The new CFO of a start-up I was working for took pride in maximizing operational cash flow velocity. One of the minor tactical tools used was a few days’ increase in the window for reimbursing employees’ expense reports.  This change handsomely improved the short term cash flow statement. However, over the next few quarters, a noticeable trend in the growth of outstanding accounts receivable started to raise red flags and call for analysis.

You may ask what this has to do with Customer Experience Management. Interestingly enough, all measurements of customer satisfaction and loyalty, both objective and subjective, started to move in the opposite direction from the operational cash flow velocity metric within the first two months of the change in reimbursement policy. The Customer Experience Manager was reporting this troubling trend for months, but nobody thought of a connection. In fact, nobody ever looked at financial and loyalty metrics together at all, and that is why it took so long to link the cause and effect.

Cashflow velocity and NPS

It turns out that the technically complex product the company sells routinely requires professional services personnel to visit customer’s premises to help them ensure successful implementation and operation. The company’s engineers spent a lot of time making customers happy, and the company was paid well and on-time for their efforts. However, improving the velocity of the company cash flow negatively impacted personal cash flow of the front line employees, as they had to wait for sizable expenses to be reimbursed and had less cash for their personal expenses. They started to avoid and delay the projects that required travel, and customers fell victim to financial efficiency efforts.

Lessons Learned:

• Customer Experience is a holistic matter – every single function of the company affects how customers perceive the entire enterprise. Of course some functions affect more than others, but they all do.
• The Customer Experience measurements are predictive of the growth or demise of a company (product or brand). The trends are critical indicators of trouble, particularly if they are gauged against market averages.
• Monitoring the correlations of trends between Customer Experience, Operational and Financial metrics allows for the fast diagnosis of potential treats to the health of your business.

Customer perceptions of products and services, or companies and brands, are measured using different scales and methodologies. Regardless of any ambiguity of definitions and sophistication of methodology, any scale you choose reflects a fundamental consideration: how does the product (service/brand/company) experience compare to customer expectations? The expectations are formed by a company’s marketing communications and advertising, other consumers’ word of mouth and (in this age of the Social Customer) pundits and existing customer reviews published online. There are many well documented ”purchasing journey” maps produced by respected researchers. Here is one example.

Most of the studies agree that the choice a customer makes is based on the expectation that the selected product will be more satisfying than most other products within the segment. Yet, many businesses measure the Customer Satisfaction of their offerings without comparing the results to their market averages. Considering that these sentiments are very dynamic, competitive comparisons make the process even more volatile and difficult to measure. However, the results are often well worth the effort, as they generate ideas for differentiation, marcom efforts optimization and operational improvements that could produce significant financial gains.

The example below shows Nokia Lumia products exceeding their customers’ expectations by a much wider margin than their top competitors and the smartphone segment average. If you are involved with Customer Experience Management, a deeper look into the reasons behind the trend may help to improve your customer journey.

The following example measures aggregated Customer Satisfaction with Small (Kitchen) Appliance Brands against average satisfaction level within that Category. It is based on content analysis of 65,379 customer reviews published online over one year period.

Such measurements can be produced using most popular scales (such as NPS or CSAT), done for any market segment that has Social Customer engagement, and results can be aggregated by brand and/or distributed by a channel.

Knowledge of customer satisfaction and experience delivered by a specific channel can be very illuminating from a brand manager’s perspective. It could be even more enlightening if customer satisfaction metrics also analyzed units sold by each channel and units returned. When these streams of data consistently correlate and/or trend together negatively, it is likely to indicate systemic channel performance problems.

From the channel perspective, customer satisfaction with specific brands – and even more importantly, with specific products – can help optimize shelf space for maximum profitability.

The detailed analysis of customer feedback (reviews) and customer support communications associated with a troubled channel or brand can provide root cause(s) and ideas for corrective actions.

Below is an example of a report on customer satisfaction with smartphones by channel/carrier. The information was mined from 142,369 online customer reviews published prior to March 30, 2013. AT&T customers who use Nokia smartphones reported customer satisfaction 21% above average across all major carriers* and all major brands.

* Sprint did not offer Nokia smartphones during the reported period.

Deeper analysis may reveal customer satisfaction by model, time period, customer gender, age group, other personal characteristic, or geographic region. Please contact us to discuss methodology for mining intelligence in your market segment.

This is our third annual analysis of customer perceptions of smartphones. This report is produced entirely by means of Social Media research. Customers became even more active in 2012, sharing their experiences with products they chose for the benefit of consumers who are shopping for smartphones.

Source: cmsoforum.mckinsey.com

The last year saw an increase in unsolicited Social Customer engagements with brands in this category of over 75% — from 29,971 in 2011 to 52,517 in 2012. The quarterly trends indicate that the rate of engagement is still accelerating. The following filters were applied to arrive to these numbers:

• smartphone models that have at least 100 customer reviews published on multiple SM sites
• content is unsolicited and volunteered by actual customers
• content was published on or before 12/31/2012

We produce smartphone market reports to illustrate the power of our technology developed for DIY primary market research of Social Media and Social Enterprise. Our software mines opinions in customers Word of Mouth to measure their engagement with brands and difference between their expectations and their experience, then predicts their propensity for advocacy. For more information about methodology used to produce this information, please visit our methodology page and/or contact the writer.

Spotlight on Customer Engagement

Brand cannot flourish without advocacy of its customers and the advocacy is not likely without engagement.  We have noticed the correlation between number of reviews published online and a number of units shipped, and therefore found it important to use for further studies. There are plenty of smartphones launched every year, but only some engage customers sufficiently to inspire them to share their experience in numbers that are required for meaningful, statistically representative analysis. The consumer exposure (i.e., advertising spent) is one factor, but not the deciding one. An example, HTC 8X, is exposed a lot more via TV advertising than Nokia Lumia 920, but the latter is reviewed online almost twice as much so far.

Samsung is the King of Customer Engagement and it is not surprising that their sales numbers are also leading the rest of the brands. More intriguing is that HTC keeps holding to the second place, considering its well publicized problems.  However the Samsung is not the only net gainer – Nokia has also seen dramatic improvement in its Social Customer engagement.

Below is a chart of the trends in Social Customer Engagement with brands year over year. As the overall engagement grows fast, only Samsung and Nokia show substantial gains capturing attention of this critically important demographics.

The Samsung Galaxy S III was the most often reviewed smartphone in 2012 (5,048), which is remarkable considering its late shipping date.  It is not really a surprise considering its market penetration (it is available under the same name from every major US carrier), and advertizing spent. This strategy does promote powerful Word of Mouth, but this smartphone was also launched before most of the others on this list.The Apple iPhone 5 was second (3,185) and iPhone 4S third (3,096) in engaging with customers.

Customer Engagement with Platforms

It appears that Social Customers display more loyalty to the smartphone platforms than to the brands as they describe their previous experiences with different manufacturer models, but mostly the same operating systems. That is why we also looked at Customer Engagement by platform.

Again, the domination of Android is to be expected even though it came down from the prior year. The dramatic drop in iOS Customer Engagement is very surprising (30% Y-O-Y), but there is enough evidence of the substantial number of iPhone customers who decided to experience Android (9%) or Windows (14%) platforms. It is always easier to show dramatic gain from a low base, but the growth of engagement with Windows customers is nothing less than remarkable at  1,032% Y-O-Y.

Spotlight on Advocacy

In the previous reports we measured Customer Satisfaction with smartphones, and then aggregated these numbers to the brand level. This year we introduced a capability to estimate (or predict) how the Social Customers would respond to the Net Promoter Score® question, if they were asked “On the scale of 0-10, how likely would you be to recommend this product to your friend or family?”. Since we work with unsolicited customer feedback, we have no ability to ask such a question. However, when customers are asked this question their typical response is to replay their experience with the product in their minds, then decide how to answer, based on those memories. These experiences are precisely the same “raw material” that is available in online customer reviews. Our software does the last piece of translating stories and experiences into a score. It is taking common language and translating it into a scale of how strongly the “author” feels about the subject – either positively or negatively.   The chart below shows aggregated NPS for each brand that is produced by calculating weighted scores of the individual smartphones that are associated with a brand.

It would not be surprising that these numbers may substantially differ from the results obtained by a survey if you consider that Social Customer enjoys anonymity that allows them to say how they really feel about their experience. The top Advocacy rating of 2012 is shared by 2 Windows smartphones – HTC Titan II (NPS=55) and Nokia Lumia 920 (NPS=55). Motorola Atrix 2 (NPS=49), Nokia Lumia 822 (NPS=47) and Samsung Galaxy Note (NPS=45) complete the top five smartphones. The basement is occupied by LG Cosmos 2 (NPS=-68), Motorola Droid 2 Global (NPS=-55) and LG Revolution (NPS=-44). These ratings are changing quite frequently. Our software recalculates every time new customers publish their experiences online. Free access to a real-time monitoring of a product category of your choice is available on trial basis.

Advocacy by Platform

Say what you want about a shortage of applications, Windows users just love their experiences with the platform. There is not a lot of them yet (4,152), but their numbers are growing fast (1.032% year-over-year) and they are very vocal. The quarterly growth trends were very consistent and apparently predictive of growing sales  (139% in Q3).

Three out of top five smartphones are powered by Windows.

We cannot provide trending information for NPS this year as this capability was launched only a few months ago.  However, we can look at Customer Satisfaction as a proxy, to see that it improved for all platforms excluding Blackberry.

The blog format does not allow enough space for detailed reports of each smartphone customer experience analysis, or their benchmarking and root cause analysis, but such information is available on request if desired. Below is an example (a screenshot) illustrating a format of Customer Experience dashboard.

In conclusion, this form of Social Media market research offers compounding benefits: faster time to insight translates into advantages in time to market. Lower research costs mean more resources that can be directed into improving the Customer Experience. All this translates into serious competitive advantage. In our experience, companies that leverage customer review data not only benefit from faster time to insight, but actually find the information more actionable.

October is here, and that signals the arrival of Piplzchoice quarterly smartphone Customer Experience report. The past reports are available upon request.

Here are a few words of explanation of the methodology used to produce this report:

• We interpret and measure “Customer Experience” according to a definition and understanding articulated by Forrester Research analysts as “how customers perceive their interactions with your company.” However, we expand it further to “your brand” and “your product” to make the measurements more actionable by branding and product management.
• we do not conduct any surveys, pose any questions, or contact any customers in any form or shape. That also means that no assumptions or keywords are constructed by Amplified Analytics personnel to produce this report. The information published here is based on proprietary, automated Opinion Mining of unsolicited and customer-generated description of their experience with specific smartphone models.
• We start with a view of a “universe” of 355 smartphone models described by 108,963 customers. We then focus on smartphones that have been reviewed during the last 3 months (39 models).
• Opinion Miner® software discovers specific attributes of customer experiences with these smartphones and measures the customers’ sentiments for each attribute.
• This is not a “buzz” sentiment monitoring exercise, as we ignore any content that cannot be reasonably attributed to experience of a paying customer. More on the methodology can be found here.

Spotlight on Brand

A share of customer reviews illustrates a level of their engagement with a brand and correlates with dynamics of their market share performance. The chart below shows a share of customer engagement with the smartphone brands during the third quarter of 2012.

As predicted in the last two reports, HTC’s share of engagement had finally come down as the Thunderbolt customers stopped describing their experiences with the long-obsolete model. Apple’s share of attention will likely rise substantially in the fourth quarter since the slow delivery of iPhone 5 has just started to produce a trickle of their customer reviews.

The big winner of customer share of attention this quarter is the Samsung at 39%. However, it is not a surprise, as its engagement with customers was growing consistently for each period on which we reported. The only other brand that shows consistent increase, albeit on a much smaller scale, is Nokia (6%).

The Average Customer Satisfaction per Brand chart paints a picture that is quite different from the results of most popular surveys that were published in a recent past. We calculated the average Customer Satisfaction of a Brand by averaging Customer Satisfaction scores of each model that belongs to the Brand.

This approach highlights how specific models can impact overall Customer Perception of a Brand. A wide range of Customer Satisfaction scores with Samsung models, from Galaxy Note=1.47 to Intercept=0.88, is responsible for lowering the Brand average. I think our approach provides better guidance for proactive Category/Brand decision management.

Spotlight on Operating Systems

Android keeps dominating the share of Customer Engagement, but Windows OS’ slice of the pie continues to grow.

The trending picture below shows the surprisingly consistent increase in Customer’s engagement with Windows OS from quarter to quarter. This is the first period WP Customers “out” reviewed the Apple Customers by 83%.

The rate of engagement correlates to a high level of Customer Satisfaction, as Windows-powered smartphones are locked in a statistical tie with Apple iPhones as five out of ten most popular models are Windows phones from different manufacturers.

It will be interesting to see how the inflow of iPhone 5 customer reviews impact that battle.

It is worth repeating that these scores reflect aggregate, average satisfaction with the phones and not with their operating systems. Let me know if you need the detail view of Customer Satisfaction with operating systems themselves.

Spotlight on Smartphone Models

Samsung Droid Charge Customers generated the largest number of reviews at 2,084 of all smartphones reviewed during this quarter. The latest arrival, Apple iPhone 5, understandably has the smallest number at 56. I expect it to change dramatically during the last quarter of 2012.

The complete list of all models included in this report can be found here.

This quarter, the HTC Radar smartphone came with the top general satisfaction score of 1.78, exceeding its customers expectations by 78% (N=406). Another HTC Window phone, Titan II (CSAT=1.69/N=83), and HTC Amaze 4G (CSAT=1.56/N=208) were the closest contenders. That is a sweep for HTC. The cellar is occupied by Blackberry Bold 9900 (CSAT=0.69/N=84), LG Cosmos (CSAT=0.76/N=644), and Samsung Intercept (CSAT=0.87/N=441). Both Intercept and Cosmos have been on the bottom for the last three quarters, and I wonder why the brands managers continue to allow the overall equity erosion to perpetuate.

In the previous installments of this report, I have presented a detailed account of Customer Experience measurements for selected models. Since the volumes of information become too large for this format, and a level of the readers’ interest in the details is not clear, I will conclude the analysis here. The detailed comparison of specific smartphone models for personal use can be found by following this link. If you are interested in SmartPhone, or other market’s, Customer Experience Measurement (CXm) dashboard implementation, please email to me directly.

Somebody said that all economic activities are focused on reducing the uncertainty of our existence. If this is true,  a consistent rate of  customer satisfaction should bring your company high rates of retention. Their advocacy would help to reduce your expenses acquiring new customers.

Does your personal experience agree with this premise? Does your business experience make you wonder if it is true?

The study of this premise was sponsored by the London School of Economics and created very convincing evidence confirming that there is indeed a strong causation between a high rate of customer satisfaction, growth of advocacy, and growth of revenues in multiple industries.

I think there are two major reasons why many companies struggle to reap the benefits of high CSAT they deliver to their customers:

• Most businesses today measure CSAT using multiple methodologies, however the complexity and cost of these exercises make it more of an event or a campaign than a consistent process. The result is a series of snapshots of what the rate of customer satisfaction was at that moment or period. That practice contradicts the original condition of our premise -  ” A consistent rate of your customers satisfaction should bring your company high rates of retention”.
• Let’s assume your customers are very satisfied with your products or services, regardless of how you measure it. What has your company done to help them share their experience with other consumers? Does anybody know if in fact your Net Promoters actually promote? And if they do – what is the impact?

Many great ideas suffer from inadequate implementation and this  is just another example. However it is much easier to question the value of the original premise when it doesn’t agree with our immediate experience, than to have the courage and conviction required to change the status quo. Even after the “quo” has completely lost it’s status.

One of the interesting challenges Marketers are charged with is to make their product or service stand out in minds of the potential customers. Those who are not blessed with analytical talents commonly slide into well bitten path to differentiate by specifications or price. These approaches do not really require any expense and/or curiosity to seek deep understanding of the customers, but they are ultimately led to erosion of profit margins and brand equity. If you, brand “owner,” don’t care about the customers, the customers don’t care about your brand. Advertising alone could carry the brands a great distance in the “good, old days” but in the age of Social Customer, an advertising message is expected to resonate with customer needs or it will cause more harm to the brand image and product sales than good. When it comes to a product reputation or brand equity, the notion that “Any publicity is good publicity” is not the best strategy.

None of it is new to most marketers and some companies are spending serious money to develop processes for discovery of consumer/customer insights. However, most are struggling to convert the findings into specific actions. Measuring financial impact of these actions seems to be an even more formidable challenge. I would like to explore these challenges and perhaps offer some ideas for dealing with them.

Many marketers today are too insulated from their customers to develop a true, genuine understanding and empathy of customer experience with the products or services they market. One of the reasons is the use of outdated market segmentation methodologies based on demographic data that was developed to help marketers to quantify and forecast, but do not provide much help in understanding the needs and discovering opportunities for differentiation. More evolved methodologies that attempt to develop customer “personas” are much more helpful in learning needs of the specific, pre-defined groups of customers. Scott Sehlhorst of Tyner Blain offered a wonderful explanation of how such methodology can be used.

Use of both abovementioned approaches together will likely to improve your product traction, but will fall short of true understanding you need to differentiate your product because everything you have learned so far is based on your own original assumptions. You start with a hypothesis of who your potential customers are, what functions and features they would like in your product, and how much they will pay for it. Then you proceed with a number of potential customers’ validation and advisory activities that confirmed or cancelled your assumptions with various degrees of certainty. However, you still don’t know if the group and personas (within the group) are your best potential customers since you cannot possibly validate that with every potential segment. Additionally, I don’t think it is possible to effectively differentiate – by design, packaging or message – without ultimate understanding how the customers experience the product. All the steps you have taken so far cannot give you this knowledge for 2 reasons:

• You have started at the “wrong” place – i.e., demographic segmentation of market is a wrong starting point. Much better starting question is – what products/services my future best customers are hiring today to do the job they need done. I use here terminology and concepts developed by Clayton Christensen. Check this video where he explains why the basic thinking taught in business schools and promulgated by consultants is killing innovation and the US economy if you are not familiar with his work.

•  Any knowledge of customer preference you have gained so far is company-biased because it was obtained by methods of inquiry and/or moderation. The one who forms a question or selects the subject of discussion ultimately influences any possible outcome. I do not believe that there is such a thing as an unbiased research, and I prefer customer’s bias to a company’s bias for the purpose of learning how a customer experiences a product or a service. This is my preference because regardless of our opinion, that is what they are going to use while selecting to purchase your product or a product of your competitor.

I am not dismissing the value of traditional methodologies off hand, but I am suggesting that substantially better results can be achieved by using triangulation of these with true insights of customer experience. There are plenty of customer-generated content available online for aggregation and analysis; however, even if you find difficult to find good data, we had very good results by asking customers wide open questions designed not for validation and easy tabulations, but to help them tell their stories:

What made you interested in a product XYZ?

• How and where do you use it?
• What was your experience so far?

Let them know that you asking because you want to learn how to make their experience better and promise that you will let them know the results of the study. Most people are motivated and willing to help. These types of questions are traditionally reserved for qualitative research that in the past was considered expensive, and the results are often dismissed as statistically not representative as they are normally reserved for a small number of customers. Those who try to find insights manually in large volumes of data are quickly get overwhelmed by “drinking from a fire hose.” However, advances in opinion mining technologies significantly reduced cost of high volume content analysis and can offer benefits of qualitative research and statistically representative numbers to back up the value of insights. In the words of Clay Shirky, “There is no information overflow-it is a filter failure.”

Good use of right technology can provide a marketer with a substantial and representative number of clues and hints to how customers think and feel about their experience with a given product or a group of products. However, no automation or outsourcing can replace your creative power of interpreting these clues into actionable insight. You can see examples regularly published on our Google+ feed.

The language customers who used to describe their experience will also provide the source of how to communicate with the market in the way the message will resonate and connect on the emotional level.

This article was originally published at CustomerThink.com and being re-posted with some updates and modifications.

Marketers used market segmentation methods for a very long time. However, as our abilities to collect and manage information continues to improve, the new methods of segmentation become available to enable more targeted marketing efforts for marketers and better products and services for consumers. One of the most commonly accepted strategies utilized is demographic segmentation based on an assumption that a specific group (based on age, gender, etc) is a primary consumer of your product or service. Sometimes this assumption is based on the product purchase history. Regardless of the validity of an assumption, it does not often provide an insight on “WHY” this demographic segment would select the product in question or “HOW” they would use it. In other words, there is a lot of guessing that has to take place or additional segmentation strategies to be deployed. In my opinion, the popularity of demographic strategy lay mostly in its low cost and ease of access as behavioral and psychographic segmentation requires a lot of research that translates into high cost and time-to-market constraints.

The advances in technology start to offer new opportunities for market segmentation based on automated analysis of customer-generated content which is becoming available with the proliferation of social media and the rise of Social Consumer. Essentially instead of assuming what demographic group would be the ideal target for our marketing efforts, we could look at a group that already expressed their interest by purchasing specific types of products or services and learn “WHAT” elements of their experience were important to them.

Joel Rubinson, one of my favorite authorities in the field,  posted this on Google+ ”as I review materials for the NYU social media class I am about to teach, I believe that Facebook will lead to the end of demographic targeting for media. Of course, content consumption and sharing behavior also enable this but Facebook will be the catalyst. Why not target on interests and actions? Thoughts?”

Most companies of any size use online survey techniques in an attempt to engage their customers, but the method does not support discovery of customer perspective; it validates assumptions of the company based on questions posed and deemed important. Again, the primary driver of survey method popularity is not the quality of the output and ability to provide better market intelligence, but the cost of implementation. I would suggest there are better alternatives today to learn unbiased market segment knowledge in applications of Opinion Mining technology to unsolicited customer-generated content.

The Opinion Mining approach offers much better quality of market segment intelligence and often rivals Survey approach in terms of implementation complexity and cost. I would like to offer an example to illustrate my point. Let’s look at tablets market segment defined by a few popular products in this category; however, non-like products that compete for the same wallet share can be used to get valuable insights:

• Apple iPad2 (666 customer “stories”)
• Blackberry Playbook (255)
• HP TouchPad (650)
• Motorola Xoom (576)
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 inch and (502)
• Toshiba Thrive (433)

These products were selected based on their popularity that manifested itself in a number of their customer-generated content references available online in a form of customer reviews, forum comments or social networks product page messages.

The first level of Customer Intelligence gained by Opinion Mining of this customer content is a list of customer experience attributes, sorted by their importance. The importance is measured as a percentage of total number of unsolicited opinions expressed by the customers. This answers the questions – WHAT is important to the customers and HOW important that is.

The next level allows the measuring of the difference between customer expectations and their experience and measures HOW well the customers’ needs are met. We use a two-point scale to visualize that difference (0=unacceptable, 1=experience meets expectations, 2=delighted); however, the measurements can easily be converted to any scale of choice without losing their meaning or accuracy. The chart below focuses on the top four attributes of customer experience by their importance to illustrate the approach.

There are practical implications of these measurements as they reflect on marcom messaging that have created customer expectations the product needs to meet. In the example above, most of the products exceeded the expectations of their customers in attributes most important to them by a significant margin. As an illustration, I would suggest that perhaps messaging about usability of these products could leverage customer sentiment to assure consumers who are hesitant to make a purchase and increase their products market adoption. That calls for a next level of intelligence that provides an answer to WHY customers feel this way and provide a context in which they express their opinions.

Above is a very small sample to illustrate the use of words and expressions (in square brackets) people to describe their opinions, and how they are attributed to a specific element of customer experience. These words, expressions ad even quotes can be used to fortify marketing messaging. Think of the very successful marketing campaign by Tempur-Pedic.

The flip side of the coin – early understanding of root causes of customer disappointment – can help to alleviate larger problems, turn the problem situation around or even present an opportunity for differentiation as illustrated below.

Looking deeper reveals a lot of unhappiness about compatibility:

And even deeper analysis will provide a context that is invaluable for taking an advantage of the opportunity (click on the image below to make it larger):

To sum it up – this type of market intelligence can be produced within a few hours at cost of a few hundred dollars without any installation, implementation or training investment which makes it difficult to ignore as an alternative or addition to survey and panels approach. As GPS technology thought us – multiplicity of signal sources results in better decision quality.

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.

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.