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Over the last few weeks I’ve been analyzing the customer reviews of the Fitbit Charge and the Samsung Gear Fit to determine which device is viewed more favorably. I’ve used a variety of PolyVista’s text analytics and storytelling visualizations to get a better understanding of what the data is saying to help give recommendations for improvement and determine which device is most well liked by the customers that use it. 

In my previous blogs, we looked at both the structured (star ratings) and unstructured (review text) data that made up the customer reviews. Most recently we reviewed the sentiment of the topics and found the Fitbit Charge customers have a more favorable opinion of their device than the Samsung Gear Fit. Now we are going to look at the individual topic “Usage” to dive deeper into what people are saying.

Data

In my last blog I started to look at the text portion of the reviews and more specifically the sentiment behind each of the topics people were talking about. This analysis gave us a high level view of the sentiment and allowed us to start drawing conclusions into why the Fitbit Charge customers might be happier than the Samsung Gear Fit. I determined that the “Usage” topic was something that customers of both devices talked about a lot (“Usage” was the third most discussed topic for both devices.) While both customers talked about “Usage” a lot, it became clear that the Fitbit Charge customers had more positive comments that the Samsung Gear Fit, reflected in the positive score of 93% compared to 68%. Now I am going to dive deeper into the “Usage” topic and see what people are talking about and determine where the Samsung Gear Fit needs to step up their game if they are going to pull even or pass the Fitbit Charge.

Analysis Results

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

Interpreting the results

The Sankey Chart makes it easy to understand the data of a specific topic. Starting on the left you can see the gray bar labeled “Usage” this is showing the total number of times “Usage” was brought up in the reviews. From there you move to the right and can see that it is broken up by sentiment (negative and positive responses.) From each sentiment the chart starts breaking down the comments into subtopics so that the reader has a better understanding of what people are specifically talking about when “Usage” is brought up in the text. 

For example in Fig. 1, I can see that 68% of the comments about “Usage” were positive and 32% were negative. The most positive comments are discussing “Tracking Sleep” and that the device is “Easy to Use”.  This is important to Samsung because it’s telling them that customers are finding the sleep track feature to be very beneficial and that the device is easy to use, which in this day and age of advanced technology is always a bonus.

When I took a look at the negative comments I can see that “Step Count” and the device’s ability to “Count Burn Calories” are the two most talked about subtopics. I found the negative comments about “Step Count” to be especially alarming. The main goal of the fitness tracker is to be able to give you an accurate depiction of the number of steps you are walking, if your device is not reliable to do that, it might not matter to some of your customers how many other bells and whistles your device might have.

Now taking a look at the “Usage” topic for Fig. 2 I can see that 93% of the “Usage” topic comments are positive and only 7% are negative. That’s a huge advantage the Fitbit Charge has over the Samsung Gear Fit. The most talked about positive subtopics are similar to the Samsung Gear Fit with “Tracking Sleep” and “Easy to Use” being the top two. “Count Burn Calories” is followed closely behind; this is interesting because the Fitbit Charge is getting a number of positive comments about this subtopic, while the Samsung Gear Fit received only negative comments. 

There are a few negative comments regarding the “Usage” of the Fitbit Charge. A few comments mentioned “Step Count” and “Stair Step Count”. While I’m sure Fitbit is shooting for all positive comments, they should be pleased that they still received more positive than negative comments in these subtopics.

The Challenge and the Opportunity for Samsung 

“Usage” is a topic that gets a lot of attention, it was the third most talked about topic for both devices. This topic is important because the customers are voicing their opinion about the various functions of their fitness band. The Fitbit Charge customers appear to be much happier than customers of the Samsung Gear Fit. Will Samsung make changes to their device to increase customer satisfaction and market share? 

In my next blog I am going to look into sentiment intensity. It’s important to see what topics customers are talking about positively and negatively, but even more important to understand which topics are viewed more strongly one way or the other. 

Conclusion

When I dug deeper into the “Usage” topic it became apparent that the Samsung Gear Fit had fallen behind the Fitbit Charge. Their customers were much more upset with accuracy of the “Step Count” and “Count Burn Calories” features. Samsung needs to determine what is causing their customer’s to have such a negative opinion of these two subtopics and find a way to make their device more accurate.