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The Apple iPhone 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6 are two of the hottest phones on the market today, battling each other for the top spot in the market.  Since I work for PolyVista – an analytics software and service provider – I have powerful resources on hand, I decided to stack the phones up against each other and attempt to determine if one technology is superior to the other.  

You can read my first blog post here, where I dug into the star-ratings of each product and determined by using a score calculation, that the iPhone users were more satisfied with their phone than Galaxy users.  The score is just the tip of the iceberg, today I am going to dig into the review comments to see what specific topics users are talking about, and tie those back to the star rating that they left with the review. In my next blog I’ll start to dissect the sentiment tied to the user’s comments.

Data

In the first part of the analysis, I only used structured data in the form of the star-ratings, and now we’re going to look at the unstructured text data in the form of the review text that the consumers wrote tied to their star-rating of the product.  By digging into the review text, we can find the different topics that the consumers are talking about.  If we think about a review as a whole “document”, each document contains one or more sentences, and each sentence contains one or more topic(s).  By looking at reviews from the topic-level, we’re able to capture all of the topics that a reviewer is discussing, and avoid trying to make an inference as to which topic is the “general” topic of the review – because often there isn’t just one topic.  

Analysis Results

More information about the “Score Bar Chart” can be found on the ChartExpo™ website.

First off, I’m sure you’re wondering how to interpret these charts:  Typically combining structured and unstructured types of data can be painful and laborious, but through the use of technology, particularly intuitive visualizations, it is quite simple.  On the left, you can see the review topics that the engine automatically extracted from the text (I didn’t pre-define anything to look for), with both counts of occurrences as well as percentage of the whole.  You’ll notice with each topic name on the left, you can also see how many comments were left relating to that topic as well as what percentage of the whole this topic group represents.

On the right we see a score number associated with each specific topic – this uses the same calculation that we used in Part 1 of the series, %Promoters minus %Detractors equals score.  For the score calculation for this chart, only the star-ratings that are tied to the respective topics are considered, rest are ignored.  For example, in Fig 1 for the topic “Screen”, the score of 67 was calculated using only the star-ratings of review comments that mentioned Screen.  

By using this calculation at the topic-level, we can quickly see which topics or issues are driving the overall scores; as topics with high scores are driving the overall score up, and conversely topics with low scores are driving the overall score down.  We can also see what topics have the greatest impact to the customers, as those that appear most commonly in reviews are listed at the top of the chart.

As I discussed previously, the overall iPhone score of 51 was nearly triple that of the Galaxy’s 18.  The first interesting point I noticed was that the iPhone score for the topic “Future Purchase” was near the highest for any category with 72.  This means that whenever consumers mentioned a future purchase in their comment, they tended to leave great ratings.  This fact also falls directly in line with known iPhone loyalty – customers tend to upgrade to a newer model of iPhone without even exploring the competition.  The Galaxy only scored a 14, its second lowest score, bad news for Samsung; it is evident that a large group of Galaxy users will shop around before just buying the next model Galaxy unlike the loyal iPhone users.

For the Galaxy S6, the topic of “Battery” performed the poorest with a score of 11, and it was also the second most mentioned of all of the topics.  This indicates that battery is a huge issue for Galaxy S6 users.  For the same topic of Battery, the iPhone 6 scored much higher with 40.  This creates an opportunity for Samsung, as this was the first model of the “G” series that doesn’t have a removable battery, and consumers clearly aren’t satisfied with the change.

Another interesting point that I noticed was how “Size” was captured in the iPhone analysis as the 6th most mentioned topic and 4th highest scoring, but Size didn’t appear in the Galaxy analysis at all.  As many of you probably know, the iPhone 6 was an increase in size over the previous models, and they even offer a bigger model (6 Plus) to cater to those who want even bigger.  Previous models were smaller than much of the competition, Samsung included, and it appears that the increase in size was a real hit with the customers.  I can also understand why size wasn’t mentioned in the Galaxy report, as the size didn’t change much from what the users were accustomed to.

A final takeaway that I have is in regards to the “Operating System” – for the iPhone (Operating System) it was one of the worst scoring topics at 36, yet for the Galaxy it is the highest rated topic at 70 (Android).  This is interesting to note, since Apple develops their own OS in-house for iPhone and has unlimited control over features and functions, Samsung doesn’t have the same luxury for the Galaxy.  The OS used in the Galaxy is Android, which is developed by Google, and Samsung is bound to the constraints of the OS in designing their product, likely not offering them the same type of flexibility or control that Apple has.

The Challenge and the Opportunity for Samsung 

Although running on what is known as an inferior OS, Apple is clearly winning the loyalty battle.  Imagine what they could accomplish if they were to boost iOS to Android-like satisfaction, the possibilities are endless.  For Samsung, it appears as if their customer base is simply not as loyal nor as satisfied, and non-removable battery is going to hurt.  The iPhone is making small steps in areas such as screen size and battery to surpass Samsung, and the data shows that customers are noticing, and is reflected in overall satisfaction.  

In the next blog I’m going to dig into sentiment – we’ve seen how the scores are reflected in the topics, but what are the topics that customers tend to talk negatively about within their reviews?

Conclusion

By adding in another data element in addition to the star-rating, analyzing the unstructured text reviews helps paint the picture as to what specific topics that users are satisfied or unsatisfied with.  Users loved the new larger size of iPhone 6 and still think that iOS is marginal, but in nearly every topic score the iPhone 6 beat out the Galaxy S6.  The iPhone loyalty is pushing Apple ahead. The Galaxy S6 users are unhappy about Samsung’s decision to make the battery non-removable.