Ranking the stars at Philips: improving your reviews using mathematics
When buying a product or choosing a restaurant, we often first consult the experiences of others. Reviews are not only valuable to consumers but also provide manufacturers with crucial insights. What if you could leverage reviews to improve your product, optimize the customer experience, and boost the satisfaction of your target audience?
For Erik van Dijk, Head of the Product Research Center for Male Grooming at Philips, this is part of his daily routine. His mission: to develop products that seamlessly align with his customers' wishes. An essential tool in this process? Reviews and ratings.
To analyze this valuable customer feedback quantitatively and utilize it systematically, Philips enlisted the expertise of CQM. How did we go about it? Read on to discover how data from reviews directly contributes to better products and stronger customer relationships.
Do you have a question for Peter?
Erik van Dijk is Head of the Product Research Center at Philips. He and his team are responsible for the male grooming division (electronic shaving and trimming products for men). They are fully committed to understanding and representing consumer needs worldwide—conducting 400 consumer and product tests annually, as well as analyzing reviews.
We interview him on this topic and also speak with Wieke Selten, the consultant from CQM involved in the project.
Erik, tell us: why are reviews so important for Philips?
“People write reviews—about products, services, experiences, just about anything. They write them whether they’re satisfied or dissatisfied. That’s why I believe every company needs to do something with them; there is so much value in a review, whether it’s positive or negative. There are reviews for Philips products, too—our shavers, for example. A review often comes with an overall star rating. At Philips, we feel our product needs to achieve a minimum score to be considered a success. So, the more stars we get, the better our product is and the better we’re meeting our customers' needs. If there’s room for improvement in our products, we definitely want to know about it—and that’s why these reviews are so important,” says Erik.
"Written reviews contain a wealth of information. There are various automated methods available to unlock this information, and in some cases, they suffice. But for our products, we need a greater level of detail and more complex models to analyze the data. That’s why we enlisted the help of CQM. These experts developed the ‘Reviews & Ratings’ approach, which quantifies exactly what consumers value in a product.
The impact of a specific review element
Wieke adds: “It is important to map out the value of a specific element. For instance, a damaged box—perhaps because the delivery person didn't handle the package with care—says nothing about the product itself, yet it can lead to a poor review score. Furthermore, how significant is delivery to the overall customer experience? These are all questions that the R&R approach can help answer. Philips places great importance on consumer value across the board, including delivery. In this instance, it is valuable to clearly identify why a review receives a lower score and whether that is due to the product or the delivery process.”
So, how does analyzing a review like that actually work?
Wieke: “CQM’s R&R approach is comprehensive. Among other things, we developed an annotation tool that allows us to assign values to words, effectively turning text into quantifiable data. We still deliberately include a manual reading step to ensure high quality, but the tool makes the process much faster and allows for easy scaling. For example, we check reviews against ten topics visible at a glance and then assign a numerical score indicating the sentiment—positive or negative—regarding the product. The tool highlights exactly what is valuable within the review. That marks the start of the full R&R analysis process. We have effectively translated text into numbers; the next step is to link those figures to the star rating in order to draw conclusions about what consumers truly value in a product.”
An extra step: A meta-analysis for a broader perspective on reviews
“Ultimately, we took an extra step together by adopting a global, high-level perspective. Previously, we had always focused on specific product categories, but we operate worldwide. That’s why it’s interesting for us to see whether someone in Europe has different needs and requirements than someone in, say, India. Is a ‘close shave’ just as important to us as it is there? And what is being said about similar products from competitors—what can we learn from that? CQM took the mathematical analysis a step further, examining all the data to see if meaningful, broad-based conclusions could be drawn. It resulted in a meta-analysis that provides insight into the dynamics across the globe. It’s really cool and incredibly useful!” Erik says, beaming.
Getting closer and closer to the consumer
He adds: “In our product category, we are constantly navigating a balancing act. Our product needs to become increasingly relevant and better without becoming prohibitively expensive. Consider someone paying 30 euros for a product: regarding which elements is it acceptable to the consumer for the product experience to differ from that of someone spending 100 or 250 euros? CQM’s R&R approach aids our decision-making: which products should we develop, what should we improve, and can we identify a pattern we can act upon? These are all matters we can now assess and determine quickly and easily. Previously, this involved a huge amount of manual work—limiting us to a small number of countries, for instance—but now we can scale up, making all our conclusions far more reliable. We are getting closer and closer to the consumer (and their feedback).”
What was it like working with CQM?
“As many know, CQM originally spun off from Philips. That is what makes this collaboration so special. For truly complex challenges, we always partner with CQM to deliver results that are highly innovative and represent the best possible solution. They prioritize accuracy and listen to what you *really* need. That aligns perfectly with the Philips philosophy, which places the consumer's needs at the heart of everything. Despite the use of highly complex analytical models, the application remains accessible. They also foster self-sufficiency: they trained our team so we can work with this R&R approach ourselves.”
Wieke concludes: “I’m probably repeating what Erik already said, but this was a fantastic project to work on. It’s a place where mathematics and the ‘real world’ truly come together. This isn’t about developing something in an ivory tower; it’s about engaging directly with the customer and seeing immediate results. We’ve been working on Reviews & Ratings at CQM for some time, and the possibilities with text analytics are constantly expanding. It’s amazing to see words and numbers make a real difference!”
Editor's note: Wieke Selten, the consultant involved in this project, is no longer employed by CQM. We have kept this case study unchanged because the insights and experiences shared remain representative of our working methods and approach.
Publication and/or reproduction of text or images is permitted only with the express consent of CQM.
Photo credits: Philips.
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