Once upon a time, phones were primarily used for making phone calls. But then smartphones arrived and changed everything. Phone calls became just one of the many things you could do with a smartphone, probably not even the most important one. Smartphones now allow us to do various activities, such as navigating, taking pictures, messaging, and checking social media.
Our smartphones are filled with apps, and how we use them varies from person to person. They have become one of the most frequently used objects in our daily lives, serving various purposes. Smartphone manufacturers are very interested in understanding what customers consider necessary when buying and reviewing a product online.
To find out what customers look for when purchasing smartphones, what they are satisfied with, and what they complain about. We analyzed over 200,000 online reviews of approximately 170 smartphones sold on Amazon UK, US, and India.
Key Finding #1: Picture quality drives (dis)satisfaction, according to our smartphone reviews analysis
Our analysis revealed that among all the topics customers discuss, picture quality is the most commonly mentioned aspect when it comes to smartphones. There are more than 24,000 reviews that contain comments about picture quality.
In the second place, customers talk about the smartphone’s performance in just under 23,000 reviews. It’s worth noting that the word “camera” is the second most frequently mentioned noun across all the reviews, right after “phone.”
Top 5 Topics by Popularity:
As we can see from the previous chart, one thing to notice is that a higher proportion of customers leave negative reviews about the picture compared to other topics. The quality of the image has a significant negative impact on a smartphone’s rating.
The graph illustrates that picture quality has the highest negative relevance among all the analyzed topics. This implies that it has the most significant influence in lowering a product’s rating. Therefore, to receive high ratings online, it is crucial to prioritize the camera and the quality of its output.
Negative Relevance Score – Top 5 Topics:
The growing popularity of pictures in our lives is undeniable, so much so that some statistics* estimate that in 2022 54,400 photos were taken every second, 4.7 billion per day, and 1.72 trillion(!!!) per year. Many of these pictures will be shared on social media, and people want them to be perfect.
This makes the camera in our phones a fundamental asset, with people paying more and more attention to it. And while there is an increasing number of comments related to this aspect, the sentiment about it is decreasing, indicating that people are less satisfied with the overall performance – probably also because they are expecting more and more.
The chart below shows how the Sentiment Index, which is the ratio between positive and negative feedback (the higher the number, the better), has decreased over the years, coming close to 0 in 2021, meaning that there are almost as many negative reviews as positive ones.
Sentiment Index Picture (Output) General:
When a customer is not satisfied with the quality of the Picture, chances are very high that he or she will leave a negative review, such as the customer feedback examples below pulled from our Wonderboard:
But not all customers and products are the same. There are, in fact, specific differences between the three countries we’ve considered for this analysis:
India is, for example, the country where a picture is by far the most important aspect, according to customer reviews. In contrast, in the UK and the US, other functional aspects such as runtime performance, ease of use, and durability are more prominent in customers’ minds.
Differences can also be appreciated across brands: Apple, for example, has virtually no negative reviews about the quality of its picture, whereas Redmi receives more negative than positive reviews on this aspect.
Key Finding #2: Customer expectations influence smartphone reviews
One additional aspect to consider is that, in certain cases, low reviews about the picture of a smartphone can be fueled by initial high expectations. If a brand advertises a product as a top product for pictures, customers will have very high expectations about it, and if those expectations are not fully met, the disappointment will be even higher.
We’ve looked, for example, at a smartphone from Samsung that has a 48MP camera as a prominent feature, and we can understand from customers’ reviews that they indeed expect a significant difference compared to lower quality cameras, while that is not always the case:
“Camera quality is very bad, seems like I’m using 13 mp camera instead of 48 mp”
“Camera quality is pathetic (both front and back). Forget about 48MP, pictures are all blur, poorer than a 4MP one.”
But as we mentioned at the beginning, Smartphones are used for the most diverse activities, not only for taking pictures. And if we look at what customers are talking about when reviewing the Performance of a phone, which is the second most discussed topic and the one with the highest impact on increasing the rating of a product, many comments are related to its speed and the possibility to perform different tasks (often simultaneously), like for example gaming:
And as we use our phones for so many purposes all day long, one additional aspect which is often a pain for many is the battery life, which is reflected in many customers’ reviews. Runtime performance is the third specific aspect that customers talk the most about, often providing context on the different activities the smartphone is used for:
“Battery will last for a day on a decent use. I am not a gamer person, I use my phone for social media and day to day usage purpose.”
“If used constantly for browsing and social media battery lasts for 12 hrs.”
“Battery Life good for average use (social media,meetings,Games)”
“I mostly use this phone for social media apps and as a gps and the battery life is decent”
Final Remarks: It may as well be a camera!
In analyzing smartphone reviews, we found that the most important aspect to consumers is picture quality, which one would expect to find when shopping for a camera and not a phone. Without a doubt, smartphones have become more than just a product we use in our daily lives.
For many, they are the center of our social relationships and our jobs. We depend so much on them that our expectations of their performances have grown significantly in many different aspects.
It’s key for brands to understand how their products and their competitors perform in all these aspects to meet customer expectations, increase their satisfaction, and ultimately improve your brand’s positioning.
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Want to better understand what customers are saying about smartphones? Get our free Cellphone VoC report today! Alternatively, contact our Voc experts to see how instant consumer insights can be obtained through the Wonderboard.
