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I’m fortunate in my role at PolyVista that I have some extremely powerful tools at my fingertips, and over the last couple of weeks have been using that technology to stack two of the leading phones on the market up against each other – the Apple iPhone 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6.  Today I wanted to take the next step and dig into the review text and look at both the topics as well as the sentiment of the consumer’s responses.

iPhone loyalty appears to be one of the driving forces to Apple’s Smartphone success.  In my previous blogs the data has shown that by looking at the products from a star-rating perspective, the iPhone is dominating the Samsung Galaxy S6.  There is plenty of opportunity for Samsung to improve and catch up or even surpass Apple, but will they step up and conquer the challenge?

Data

In my previous analysis blogs (Part 1 and Part 2) we started with just the overall star ratings and then married together the conversation topics with the star ratings.  In this analysis, we’re going to look at the data from a different perspective – what is the sentiment or tone of the statements that the consumers are writing.  From a sentiment perspective we can have positive/satisfied, negative/unsatisfied, or neutral sentiment.  Typically I tend to omit neutral sentiment simply because a neutral statement it isn’t at all actionable.  Reading through all of these responses and distilling them down to individual statements and then determining the sentiment can be brutally painful, but lucky for me, I have technology and data scientists at my hands that can do it automatically, with next to no effort needed from me.

Analysis Results

More information about the “Sentiment Matrix Chart” can be found on the ChartExpo™ website.

Interpreting the results

The initial thought you may have is that this visualization is fairly self-explanatory, and you’re right on point. The different topics that consumers are talking about are listed on the left with a count, in ranked order from top to bottom showing most frequently mentioned at the top and least frequently mentioned on the bottom.  The topics that show up near the top of the chart tend to be more impactful to the business, as they are the topics that customers are commenting on the most within their reviews.

You’ll also notice for each topic there is a green and red bar, and this shows the breakdown between both the positive and negative sentiment of the comments related to each topic.  Within each colored bar, there is both a count value and percentage.  If you look at Fig. 1 and the green/positive bar for “Customer Experience”, you’ll see 96% (13.6k) – this is telling us that 96% of the comments regarding to the topic Customer Experience are positive in sentiment, and the count of those statements is 13.6k.

My initial takeaway has me intrigued – although from a star-rating perspective the iPhone scored nearly four times better than the Galaxy, the story is not the same when we look at the overall sentiment of the review comments.  For the iPhone, 88% of all review statements are positive in sentiment, and for the Galaxy that number only drops to 83%.  One hypothesis I have for this result is that iPhone and Samsung users tend to talk about their phones in a similar manner within their review comments, but the iPhone loyalty is causing the users to be generous in star-ratings.  Samsung is lagging far behind Apple from the score perspective, but with the overall sentiment of consumer’s reviews so close, the gap is insignificant.

Another interesting point I noticed is for the topic “Button”.  For this topic, 53% of the comments for both the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S6 were negative, and the Button topic had the second-highest percentage of negative comments of any topic.  What this is telling me is that it’s not an issue of one phone or the other, consumers just aren’t happy with the current button technology.  Although it’s currently an issue that consumers are not satisfied with, it creates an opportunity for Apple or Samsung to evolve their technology to replace the Button(s) with a feature that consumers are more favorable towards.

A final data point I noticed was for the topic of “Battery”.  In my previous blog I talked about the score for battery being the worst of all for Samsung, and in further digging into the sentiment of the comments I get more evidence that consumers are clearly unhappy.  Battery is the second-most talked about topic, and it has the worst percentage of negative comments.  Consumers are unhappy about the change from the removable battery, and it is reflected in both their star-ratings as well as their review comments.

The Challenge and the Opportunity for Samsung 

Samsung made a big mistake when they launched the S6 with a major change from the S5 – no removable battery.  This is really a sore issue with customers, and they made sure to reflect it both in the ratings and reviews.  The good thing about this issue though is it’s not a difficult fix, the technology is already there, just need to make some minor changes and not re-invent the wheel.  Making a change like this to what the consumers want can have a major positive impact, since we’ve already seen how the wrong change can have a large negative impact.

There is also a potential race for Apple and Samsung to get a leg up by evolving their button technology and developing an alternative that is more preferred by customers.  Should Apple win the race it will vault them even further ahead, but if Samsung can launch this new technology first, it will really help them narrow the lead that Apple has edged out.

In the next blog I’m going to take a deeper dive into the “Battery” topic – how is what the users say about the iPhone battery different from what users say about the Galaxy battery?  Is there further room for improvement besides the non-removable battery issue?  This deeper dive is typically not easy to do, but through the use of technology I’m able to get to a very granular level to find the highly actionable insights.

Conclusion

When I looked at the data using the star-ratings, the iPhone has a definitive edge, but after investigating the sentiment of the review text, it appears as the race is closer than meets the eye.  Galaxy S6 customers are clearly disappointed with the non-removable battery change, and users of both models think the current button technology is unsatisfactory. There is opportunity for both companies to step up and improve, but who will make the changes first?