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It’s becoming more and more common to come across reports and studies about the obesity epidemic affecting America. People are starting to take new steps to try and live a healthy lifestyle, one of these steps has included wearing a fitness band to monitor your steps, distance traveled, calories burned, and in some cases even monitoring your heart rate. I’ll admit, I’m one of the people that have purchased a fitness band, I find that it holds me accountable each day to hit my goal, and others I have spoken with say the same thing. Recently the market has become saturated with a number of different companies offering a wide variety of devices. How as a consumer do you know if you are making the best purchase that fits your needs? 

The company I work for, PolyVista, specializes in finding trends and patterns hidden within customer feedback. We’ve done analysis on online customer reviews for two fitness bands, the Fitbit Charge and the Samsung Gear Fit. This analysis will uncover the topics people are discussing along with telling a story of the likes and dislikes of the product they purchased. By using this information it will allow a potential customer to make the most informed decision possible.

Data

Online review data is a great source of how customers truly feel about a product. The reviews are typically unbiased and are not coerced so you know that the information is an accurate depiction of the reviewer’s thoughts about the product. These reviews contain both structured and unstructured data. The structured data includes star rating, date and location, while the text in the reviews allows the customer to describe the positive and/or negative feelings they have toward the product they purchased. For the first blog in this series I am going to focus on the overall star rating of the data. 

Analysis Results

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

The first question you probably have is “how do I read this chart, and what is it 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 Samsung Gear Fit visualization (Fig. 1), 45% of reviewers are promoters and 36% of the reviewers are detractors, so therefore 45% minus 36% equals the score of positive 9, as can be seen in Fig. 1.

The same can be done for the Fitbit Charge (Fig. 2). We see that 59% of Fitbit Charge customers are promoters and 25% are detractors, this gives them a positive score of 33.

Now that the scores have been calculated we can see from an overall view that the Fitbit Charge customers are more happier (score of 33), their score is about four times higher than the Samsung Gear Fit (score of 9) From a promoter perspective we can see that 58% of people have a highly favorable opinion about the Fitbit Charge, the Samsung Gear Fit customers on the other hand are showing a high degree of satisfaction at 45% 

The neutral reviews are pretty even on both sides; Samsung Gear Fit has 19% of reviews falling in this range, while the Fitbit Charge has 16%. 

Another distinguishing piece of information is found in the detractors. The Fitbit Charge is showing that 25% of people have a negative view of their purchase. Samsung Gear Fit detractors jump up 11% to 36%, that’s more than 1 out 3 customers who were not happy with their product. 

Looking at this data from a ratings perspective we can see that Fitbit Charge customers appear to be happier with their selection, however they are not immune to negative comments. 

It looks as though there is room for Samsung to close the gap and gain some of the market share.  They have an opportunity to make improvements, 31% of the people reviewing the product fell into the 3-4 star range. If they can convert half of those people into 5 star customers that improves their promoters to 60-61%, by doing so they would be able to pass the Fitbit Charge in promoter score. 

Calculating a score based on star rating is a great way to get a quick look at which fitness band is making its customers the happiest, but diving deeper into the text will help us find the why behind the numerical score. In my upcoming blogs I will take a deeper dive into the data to uncover the topics and sentiment that people discuss, this should give us a better understanding of what’s driving the review ratings.

Conclusion

After looking at the star rating analysis we can see that the Fitbit Charge is ahead of the Samsung Gear Fit in customer satisfaction.  It’s still unclear whether Fitbit has a superior product or they are more recognizable in the fitness band market since Fitbit is the industry leader in market share.  What we need to investigate further is whether the Fitbit Charge is really almost four times better than the Samsung Gear Fit as the initial findings indicate.