How Netgear Used AI to Generate Over $5.5 Million in Value

Netgear is among the world’s largest networking hardware providers. Since their 1996 founding, Netgear has been steadily growing and expanding around the world, now with offices in 25 countries. 

Today, Netgear is responsible for many cutting-edge innovations, such as the world’s first WiFi 6E router (a router that takes advantage of the 6GHz frequency band), as well as one of the world’s first 5G mobile hotspots.

Netgear’s product teams are tasked with creating feature-rich products across a variety of verticals—including home WiFi solutions, wired networking, mobile WiFi solutions, gaming routers, and more—that need to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction.

Creating new products, services, and features at this scale requires a deep understanding of customer sentiment in order to understand the customer’s wants and needs. Let’s explore how Netgear partnered with Commerce.AI to accomplish this and generate over $5.5 million in value.

Detecting Abnormal Customer Sentiment

Traditional customer sentiment analysis is a difficult task, and isn’t able to adequately analyze the myriad of platforms customers use to create a holistic understanding of sentiment, and particularly of abnormal customer sentiment.

For a company with over a billion dollars in revenue, it’s likely that millions are spent on customer research. Research is tremendously expensive for large business titans looking to expand. In 2018, for instance, Amazon spent nearly $23 billion on R&D.

Accurately analyzing sentiment requires a complex data pipeline that crawls through a myriad of platforms in order to collect, clean, read, and analyze text data. This includes online product reviews and discussion forums, blogs, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and more. Large brands need to be able to leverage this feedback into their key decisions such as design, operations and marketing.

Customer.AI enables brands to leverage customer feedback, with a data engine that has now analyzed over 600 million products and services from over 100 sources.

Netgear is using this engine to track customer ratings and reviews in order to detect abnormal customer sentiments. In addition to the existing database of product and service content, Commerce.AI has analyzed over 400,000 reviews across over 25,000 networking hardware products to provide Netgear with greater consumer insights.

AI versus Human Efforts

Previously, Netgear was spending 20+ hours a week manually curating the reviews leading up to their weekly operations meetings. By leveraging the Commerce AI platform, they were able to upgrade their methods to drive productivity and could use that time to prioritize their product and service enhancement efforts.

For large scale data, which is the reality in today’s world, we have surpassed human performance. We continue to improve our techniques, data set and computation infrastructure.

Ultimately, AI vastly outperformed human efforts, as Netgear gained over $100,000 in ROI of improved productivity, around $1.6 million in impact/effort value, and around $3.8 million in de-escalation savings, for a total of over $5.5 million in value from using Commerce.AI.

How it Works

We’ve explored how Netgear uses AI to enhance their product at a high-level, but how does it actually work?

Commerce.AI automatically scans the web – including customer reviews and feedback – to identify new and trending products and category attributes, across own and competing brands, that can be used to deliver a more relevant and satisfying customer shopping experience. 

These insights are built on a framework that supports multiple data formats to provide a robust understanding of the product quickly and efficiently.

Commerce.AI’s solution gathers public opinions about products in forums, on YouTube, or in articles. The results are visualized in a self-service dashboard. Based on that reports can be created that show insights about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, trends of specific product segments. 

Summary

Product teams today have a harder job than ever before, and are tasked with creating successful products in a highly-competitive market.

Customers have more choices than ever before, but are also generating more data than ever, which means that AI-powered product teams can conduct better market research to understand customer sentiment, and stay ahead of the curve.