Introduction Summer is here and you’re planning a cookout for friends and family. The only problem is your current grill is on its last leg and you need to replace it. Recently infrared grills have become the newest craze, but you’re not sure if you want to move away from a traditional gas grill. This is an important decision, a grill is something you’ll have for years and is essential to making your meal a success. There are a number of factors to consider when buying a grill, for instance how well it cooks, how easy is the assembly, the quality of the parts, and what features are important to you just to name a few. With infrared grills joining the market and competing against gas grills how will you know you’re making the best decision for your grilling needs? Wouldn’t it be great to get the opinions of hundreds of people that have purchased these grills so you know what they like and dislike so you can make the most informed decision? I work for a company, PolyVista, which specializes in finding trends and patterns hidden within customer feedback such as reviews and/or comments. We pulled online customer reviews for infrared and gas grills. After harvesting these reviews we performed analysis to find the topics that people were discussing. This information will be able to tell us what the customer like and dislike (i.e. sentiment) about their grill purchase. We’ll be able to see based on the opinions of people that have actually used the products what type of grill is right for you. Data The data we are using for this analysis is from online reviews that were left by people that have purchased either gas grills or infrared grills. These reviews contain both structured and unstructured data. The structured data includes the date, location and a star rating and the unstructured data is the text the reviewer leaves that goes into detail about their opinion of their purchase. For the first blog in this series I am going to focus on the star rating. Analysis Results
More information about the “Score Detail Chart” can be found on the ChartExpo™ website. After looking at this chart you might be asking yourself “what is this chart telling me?” Every time a consumer leaves a review they are classified as a promoter, neutral, or detractor based upon the rating used. Ratings of 5-star are considered promoters since they’re leaving the best possible rating. Ratings of 4-star are considered to be neutral, as these raters are saying that the product is good, but not great. Those who leave ratings of 1 through 3-star are considered detractors, as the message they’re sending with their rating is that the product is average at best. Calculating the score is straightforward: the engine takes the percent of people that leave promoter scores, and subtract the percent of people that leave detractor scores and then we have the score. In the infrared score detail chart (Fig. 1), 51% of reviewers are promoters and 27% of the reviewers are detractors, therefore 51% minus 27% equals the score of positive 24, as can be seen in Fig. 1. I can calculate the score the same way for the gas grills. 65% of their customers are promoters and 15% are detractors which gives them a positive score of 50. Now that the scores have been calculated I can see that the gas grill customers appear to be much happier with an overall score of 50, which is more than double when compared to the customers of the infrared grill that scored 24. The neutral reviews are showing that both types of grills are comparable. The infrared grill customers have a 21% neutral rating while the gas grill customers are right behind with a 20% neutral rating. When looking at the detractors I can see a wide gap between the two grills. 15% of all gas grill customers were detractors, infrared grill customers nearly doubled that with 27% of them falling on the detractor side. This is a very telling piece of information, it’s showing me an area where the infrared grills need to bridge the gap if they are going to improve their score and catch up to the gas grills. Although the infrared grills are clearly behind in overall score, it appears as though they have an opportunity to make up some ground on the gas grills. With 21% of their customers (or about 1 out of 5) falling into the neutral category, they could convert half of these into promoters to be nearly on the same level as the gas grills. The neutral category has customers that aren’t delighted, but at the same time they aren’t all that upset. Going above and beyond to change these customers into promoters will go a long way in gaining more of the market share. Looking at these overall scores is a great place to start when investigating what grill would be the best for you. Now if we take the text that goes along with these reviews and add that to the mix I’ll get a better understanding of why the overall scores are what they are. In my upcoming blogs I plan on taking a deeper dive into the text and see what topics and the sentiment the customers of the grills are talking about. Conclusion When I compared the overall scores of the two types of grills it appears that the gas grills are ahead of the infrared grills by a large margin. I am still not certain if this is because the gas grills are a superior product or if the reason lies in the fact that the infrared grills are a newer technology and it’s something people aren’t used to yet. By investigating further I should be able to get a better understanding of why the infrared and gas grills received their scores by looking at the text from the reviews.