Say you’re a product manager responsible for a line of MP3 players. One of the players is not selling well, in spite of various promotional activities including two price reductions within the last six months. You still can’t find lift.
As with any product development cycle, you conducted focus groups and researched the market to determine the optimal feature set for your target audience, at a compelling price point. The research didn’t yield any unexpected or actionable results.
In addition to handling your regular workload, you have several hundred online customer reviews collected over the last 60 days to plow through. It’s vital to read these reviews but you simply don’t have the bandwidth to go over them all with an attention they require. You need an easy way to filter out relevant customer themes that provide quick, current, actionable insights from customers.
Competitive products offer almost the exact same features as your MP3 player at a similar price. You’re now working on a next- generation player but aren’t clear on what the “must have” features should be for this version. Not only is your market data ambiguous, but also it’s now stale after all this time.
Sound familiar?
Enter Amplified Analytics. Using AAI’s Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter (PRMIR), which is based on semantic analysis of customer reviews and behavioral economics models, product managers and key decision makers can quickly segregate and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) like Customer Satisfaction (CSI) with a product functionality, reliability and a quality of support.
Top category selections, such as MP3 players, on the PRMIR data entry screen are, easily identifiable and simple to find. Users can see the ratio of reviews to products, using a significant product sampling (in the case of the MP3 player, 75:1). All listings are date stamped, so that users know precisely when data has been updated. In just four mouse clicks, a product manager is able to generate meaningful functionality rates for his or her product;
The PRMIR interface allows customers to make multiple selections of competing manufacturers and filter the number of reviews and ranges for several performance indicators, including Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI), Product Functionality Score (PFS), Product Reliability Score (PRS) and Product Support Score (PSS).
The Product Satisfaction Analysis report is generated in less than a minute. Within five minutes, in this particular scenario the product manager would discover that 5% of customers were reporting design issues with the battery compartment latch design.
When recalculating the CSI factoring out this specific design issue, the MP3 player in question outscores the competition by 4.2%. An up-to-date analysis with easily importable data is available in less than 15 minutes; the entire process takes less time than a normal lunch hour. Most important, stakeholders walk away with accurate data and tangible feedback to ensure customer satisfaction and profitability of future products.
I just re-read an excellent post by Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group. Jeremiah used to work for Forrester Research and just recently joined the Altimeter. There are a couple of quotes that started me going
Beyond monitoring, insight from the social sphere is untapped. Social media monitoring is just the first baby step, most companies haven’t tapped into what the data actually means.
We all, more or less, know what monitoring is. Here is an example of definition that come reasonably close to the marketing context after the word “enemy” is replaced by something more appropriate, like “customer” or “consumer”, depending on what is one monitors.
The act of listening, carrying out surveillance on, and/or recording of enemy emissions for intelligence purposes.
So presumably obtaining “the insight” and/or “intelligence” is the purpose of the exercise. The most interesting question for me is – what are we going to do with this precious intelligence when we get it?
The second quote from this post, used here out of sequence, is
… marketers were used to ‘Bowling’, where marketers could easily throw a message down the aisle and hit the pins with great confidence. Now, he eloquently describe, it was more like ‘Pinball’ where a marketer could load the message up, shoot it out, but have no idea where it will end up.
It seem to me that despite all the talk by the “enlightened” marketers, by “listening” they still try to figure how to control the flow of messaging, rather than to “hear” and engage into conversation. “Listening” without deep desire to “hear” cannot yield any insight or “Aha!” moment, and these are the ones that lead to meaningful and measurable actions. No wonder there is so much yearning for a magic ROI formula for Social Media investments. It is very difficult to figure a return on knowledge you didn’t bother to learn yet.
Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.
It seems that the major difference between product management practices in the software business and the consumer electronics business lies in the perception of how, or even whether, a life cycle of a product can be managed after its release.
In software, alpha and beta testing by actual users are a common practice, that results in multiple releases based on actual user experiences learned or observed during these processes. In other words the product is actively managed throughout its life-cycle.
In contrast CE product management practices do not appear to be very pro-active after product launch, and are limited primarily to promotional functions. If a product is expected to have an 18-24 month life, focus groups are organized 12-14 months after product launch, to learn how to design and market its next generation. These exercises are very expensive in that they require a lot of effort to organize, and a lot of special skills to produce truly valuable results, hence they are often contracted to specialists.
Most intelligence a company can gain about its customers’ experiences is by listening to its customers, literally. While customer satisfaction surveys are valuable, they are typically post-dated from the original experience and only solicit feedback based on topics the company deems important.
There are multiple channels available for finding this data, and multiple technology offerings to process it into a meaningful source of business intelligence, however I am not aware of many processes that use this intelligence to pro-actively manage launched CE products profitability.
At Samsung, using reviews as a source of feedback “has changed some aspects of the way we work, primarily because of the speed with which information comes in”, says Kris Narayanan, Samsung’s director of marketing. “It helps us look at issues as they arise. If there is a malfunction or a problem, then we identify it very early.”
The company has used reviews in this way for less than a year, but Narayanan says Samsung has already changed products in response to the new kind of feedback. For instance, large flat-panel televisions were initially produced with speakers on the side. When customers pointed out in their reviews that the units were too wide to fit into conventional cabinets, Samsung put the speakers below the screen.
The example above is a very positive one, but keep in mind it only addresses the issue of the “next” product design – not how to improve profitability of the “current” product. However I suggest that it can be done and I would love to learn about people and companies who are already do, before starting to speculate how I would approach doing it myself.
As usual, your comments, opinions and experiences are greatly appreciated.
A blog about experiences, curiosity and the never-ending search for ways to do better things better