When analyzing Smart TV customer reviews you expect to see topics that usually revolve around product quality or customer service issues. One topic you may be surprised to see come up is the smell. When initially identified, the smell was considered to be a bug or mistake in QA analytics, but it turned out to be a major trending topic.

In this article, we’ll address why smell is an important topic discussed for smart TVs and how Revuze AI picked “Smart TV smell”, How it affects customer experience, ways to monitor customer experience, and how to get an accurate customer sentiment analysis you need to identify similar issues, or simply put why smell is an important topic discussed for Smart TVs?

This Smart TV stinks. Literally.

Most electronic devices manufactured nowadays contain glue, protective coatings, and plasticizers. These materials are full of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC), which evaporate at room temperature and create this “new Smart TV” smell. Normally, such materials are not harmful and with sufficient ventilation will evaporate quickly. Unfortunately, some Smart TV brands seem to use VOC more extensively than others.

After recently purchasing a Smart TV from a well known brand, many customers have reported bad chemical smell coming out when opening the packaging or while using the device. Some have complained of headaches and nausea, and others had to place it for nearly a month in a well ventilated room for the smell to subside. 

Consequently, customers left lengthy reviews and posts wondering about the origin and effects of the bad smell. Unsatisfied customers filled review sections and forums with descriptions of their bad experience. The overall good customer experience seemed to be overshadowed by the awful scent. In most cases, even if the customer was pleased with the performance of the TV itself, they often gave a very low rating due to the smell.

Since ‘smell’ is not a major topic when analyzing customer sentiment, it could have been easily overlooked. However, such a pervasive negative word-of-mouth shouldn’t be ignored. Customer dissatisfaction is often followed by increased product returns and overall negative customer sentiment. Unattended, bad customer experience can harm sales and have long term effects on a brand’s reputation. A good way to avoid these scenarios is to monitor customer sentiment.

Brand sentiment tracking

So, how can you monitor customer sentiment towards your band? There are several customer experience (CX) analysis tools you can use. 

First, we rely on a highly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), developed by our R&D team which is a part of our self learning AI . The goal of NLP is to process natural language to identify customer sentiment in online reviews and social media posts. In the case of the “Smart TV smell”, NLP identified an association between the mention of ‘smell’ and words like return, box, remote, odor, strong, and screen. Word associations and connections found in language processing can alert to customer sentiment hidden in online reviews. The end result is a better understanding of customer attitude towards a product or service.

Another great option is Social Media Sentiment Tracking. It would be nice to know if a new product gets positive mentions on facebook. Instagram or twitter. Also, spotting customer dissatisfaction early on can prevent negative sentiment from spreading online. Monitoring a brand’s social media presence can provide crucial information and help improve marketing strategies. 

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) surveys are another way to measure customer experience. Customers are asked one or several questions, for example – ‘How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [product/service] ?’. Answers are given using a 1 to 5 scale (From Very dissatisfied to Very satisfied). Results are calculated to give a percentage scale: 100% being total customer satisfaction, 0% total customer dissatisfaction.

Although CSAT can’t analyze customer sentiment, it can provide a clear numerical scoring of customer satisfaction. The information helps track changes in customer satisfaction with a service or product and aid data-driven decision making. 

Voice of the Customer

Looking for a more extensive CX analysis? use Voice of the Customer (VoC) Solutions. 

Voice of the Customer is the analysis of various customer feedback sources, focused on customer’s experience and expectations of products or services. Instead of relying on just one output, like social media, VoC solutions use several sources of customer feedback for sentiment analysis. The wide variety of feedback sources allows for higher accuracy in customer sentiment analysis. 

Revuze developed the first self-training, low touch AI Voice of the Customer solution that can collect and analyze customer data automatically and serve back valuable insights.

This innovative AI technology collects data from online reviews, social media monitoring, emails, surveys, call center data, and more. The data is scanned automatically and independently by self learning algorithms to discover new topics, like the “Smart TV smell”, otherwise overlooked by human trained systems.

The end result is highly granular CX analysis that informs marketing campaign design and resource allocation that help improve sales and earnings.

If you want to learn more about Customer Analytics and Sentiment Analysis, check out our this Blog post.

Simone Somekh

Simone Somekh is a New York-based writer and editor who specializes in marketing and communications for B2B SaaS companies. He teaches Communications at Touro College and he is the author of an award-winning novel published in four languages.