Artificial Intelligence company Aspectiva, which analyzes user-generated
content UGC from across the web to generate insights for retailers and
shoppers, applied its technology to determine exactly what shoppers liked and
disliked about key US retailers.
They gave us this informaiton:
Collecting text opinions from across the web - including from reviews,
forums, social media, YouTube, the report found that Barnes & Noble was
ranked the best eCommerce site in the US.
The online bookstore came top in a list of over 40 retailers.
Aspectiva’s analysis found that Barnes & Noble shoppers rated highly their
“fast service”, “prices” and “easiness” when using their website. Their
coupons, however, were flagged as lacking being both difficult to use online
and too short in duration.
Aspectiva’s fully unsupervised, text-driven and machine learning Artificial
Intelligence (AI) allows them to distinguish the aspects about each retailer
that consumers loved and hated the most. For example, Wayfair was ranked
highest for “value”, Walmart best for “deals”, Macy’s top for “products” and
Abercrombie & Fitch highest for “quality”.
When analyzing the opinions of all 42 online retailers, Aspectiva
examined which positive and negative aspects were mentioned most often.
Retailers will be interested to note that shoppers rated “prices”,
positive “service / customer service” and great “deals” most
frequently when giving a positive review about a retailer.
When leaving a negative review about an eCommerce site, consumers
mentioned bad “service / customer service” regularly with Rakuten,
Urban Outfitters and Dell ranking amongst the lowest for their service. “Prices” is
another common complaint and here both Apple and Nordstrom are ranked low.
Finally, “damaged or missing items” were mentioned regularly by
shoppers with Newegg and Overstock.com placed low down for this specific
aspect.
Amazon came seventh in the list with “order issues” and “poor packaging”
being negatively cited online. Apple came ninth with “high prices” and
complaints about the iPhone being common causes of complaint.
At the other end of the scale 1-800-Flowers, sports apparel retailer
Fanatics, and sneaker store Footlocker were ranked as the lowest scoring
retailers with customer service a regular source of complaint.
My take on this
AI has moved along leaps and bounds although there are issues with content analysis. Aspectiva seems to have found a solution as they analyse entire phrases, which remove the issues about sarcasm and irony not being able to be assessed.
Labels: content analysis, ugc analysis
