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Customer Experiences influence Consumer Selections

This is our third annual report into dynamics of customer perceptions of smartphones produced entirely by means of

Social Media research. Customers became even more active in 2012 sharing their experiences with products they chose

for the benefit of consumers who are shopping for smartphones. The last year saw over 75% increase in Social Customer

unsolicited engagements with brands in this category from 29,971 in 2011 to 52,517 in 2012. The quarterly trends

indicate that the rate of engagement is still accelerating. The following filters were applied to arrive to these numbers:

smartphone models that have at least 100 customer reviews published on multiple SM sites

content is unsolicited and volunteered by actual customers

content was published on or before 12/31/2012

We produce smartphone market reports to illustrate the power of our technology as we develop tools for DIY primary

market research of Social Media and Social Enterprise. Our software mines opinions in customer/employees Word of

Mouth to measure their engagement with brands, difference between their expectations and their experience, and

predicts their propensity for advocacy. For more information about methodology used to produce this information,

please visit our Methodology page and/or contact the writer.

Spotlight on Customer Engagement

Brand cannot flourish without advocacy of its customers and the advocacy is not likely without engagement. We have

noticed the correlation between number of reviews published online and a number of units shipped, and therefore

found it important to use for further studies.

Samsung is the King of Customer Engagement and it is not surprising that their sales numbers are also leading the rest of

the brands. More intriguing is that HTC keeps holding to the second place, considering its well publicized problems, even

though the drop is substantial. However the Samsung is not the only net gainer - Nokia has also seen dramatic

improvement in its Social Customer engagement.

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Below is a chart of the trends in Social Customer Engagement with brands year over year. As the overall engagement

grows fast, only Samsung and Nokia show substantial gains capturing attention of this critically important demographics.

Samsung Galaxy S III was 2012 most often reviewed smartphone (5,048), which is remarkable considering its late

shipping date. Apple iPhone 5 was second (3,185) and iPhone 4S third (3,096) in engaging with customers.

Customer Engagement with Platforms

It appears that Social Customers display more loyalty to the smartphone platforms than to the brands as they describe

their previous experiences with different manufacturer models, but mostly the same operating systems. That is why we

also looked at Customer Engagement by platform.

Apple 12%

HTC 23%

LG 7% Motorola

18% Nokia 5%

RIM 5%

Samsung 31%

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

2012

2011

©Amplified Analytics Inc. 206 Water Street, Pt. Richmond, CA 94801

Again, the domination of Android is to be expected even though it came down from the last year. Dramatic drop in iOS

Customer Engagement is very surprising (30% Y-O-Y), but there is enough evidence of substantial number of iPhone

customers who decided to experience Android (9%) or Windows (14%) platform. It is always easier to show dramatic

gain from the low base, but Windows growth of engagement with customer is nothing less than remarkable at 1,032%

Y-O-Y.

Spotlight on Advocacy

In the previous reports we measured on Customer Satisfaction with smartphones, and then aggregated these numbers

to the brand level. This year we introduced a capability to estimate (or predict) how the Social Customers would respond

to the Net Promoter Score® question, if there were asked "On the scale of 0-10, how likely would you recommend this

Android 72%

BOS 5%

iOS 12%

Windows 11%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Android BOS iOS Windows

2012

2011

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product to your friend or family?". Since we work with unsolicited customer feedback, we have no ability to ask such a

question. However, when customers are asked this question their typical response is to replay their experience with the

product in their minds, then decide how answer, based on those memories. These experiences are precisely the same

"raw material" that is available in online customer reviews. Our software does the last piece of translating stories and

experiences into a score. It is taking common language and translating it into a scale of how strongly the "author" feels

about the subject - either positively or negatively. The chart below shows aggregated NPS for a brand that is produced

by calculating weighted scores of the individual smartphones that are associated with a brand.

It would not be surprising that these numbers may substantially differ from the results obtained by a survey if you

consider that Social Customer enjoys anonymity that allows them to say how they really feel about their experience. The

top Advocacy rating of 2012 is shared by 2 Windows smartphones - HTC Titan II (NPS=55) and Nokia Lumia 920

(NPS=55). Motorola Atrix 2 (NPS=49), Nokia Lumia 822 (NPS=47) and Samsung Galaxy Note (NPS=45) complete the top

five smartphones. The basement is occupied by LG Cosmos 2 (NPS=-68), Motorola Droid 2 Global (NPS=55) and LG

Revolution (NPS=44). These ratings are changing quite frequently and recalculated every time as new customers publish

their experiences online. Free access to a real-time monitoring of a product category of your choice is available on trial

basis.

Advocacy by Platform

Say what you want about a shortage of applications, Windows users just love their experiences with the platform. There

is not a lot of them yet (4,152), but their numbers are growing fast (1.032% year-over-year) and they are very vocal. The

quarterly growth trends were very consistent and apparently predictive of growing sales (139% in Q3).

22 21

-34

-18

23

-17

3

Apple HTC LG Motorola Nokia RIM Samsung

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Three out of top five smartphones are powered by Windows.

We cannot provide trending information for NPS this year as this capability was launched only a few month ago.

However, we can look at Customer Satisfaction as a proxy, to see that it improved for all platforms excluding Blackberry.

The blog format does not allow enough space for detailed reports of each smartphone customer experience analysis, or

their benchmarking and root cause analysis, but such information is available on request if desired. Below is an example

(a screenshot) illustrating a format of Customer Experience dashboard.

-9

-17

22 25

-20

-15

-10

-5

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Android BOS iOS Windows

Android BOS iOS Windows

2012

2011

2010

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In conclusion, this form of Social Media market research offers compounding benefits: faster time to insight translates

into advantages in time to market. Lower research costs mean more resources that can be directed into improving the

Customer Experience. All this translates into serious competitive advantage. In our experience, companies that leverage

customer review data not only benefit from faster time to insight, but actually find the information more actionable.