Improving customer experience through data aggregation and analysis
SHERWIN WILLIAMS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
The launch of Sherwin-William’s first ever DIY product line at big box retail was failing, with sales and review ratings performing well below expectations.
To better understand and improve customer experience, we began a pilot project to aggregate and analyze tens of thousands of open-source customer reviews from a variety of retailer websites across Sherwin-Williams brands and competitor brands.
We utilized star ratings to conduct a macro sentiment analysis. We then organized reviews into topic categories and utilized natural language processing techniques to analyze sentiment for each topic, allowing us to determine positive and negative attributes for each brand and product line.
We leveraged classification and clustering techniques to discover the true drivers of category engagement, as well as the unique drivers of positive and negative experience by brand.
As it turned out, HGTV HOME by Sherwin-Williams product lines were the lowest-rated on the most important attributes for DIY consumers. To better appeal to DIY painters, we made the strategic recommendation to reformulate and relaunch an interior paint with a thickness that matches consumer expectations.
Our insights also lead to the strategic recommendation of launching an incentivized review program to close the ratings gap for HGTV HOME by Sherwin-Williams.
Sherwin-Williams allocated significant marketing dollars to run promotional review campaigns in 2017 which significantly increased the review volume and ratings of their products on Lowes.com.
As a result of our work, Sherwin-Williams was able to uncover the key drivers of initial low performance with this inaugural big box product line launch and immediately pivot. Our product formulation and marketing campaign recommendations led to significant improvement in sales performance and product ratings – closing the ratings gap in a single season.
