Last night, I noticed that Brother started to run again its printer’s Reliability commercials on TVknown as Printing Dreams. If you did not see it, the company makes a claim that their printers are the most reliable on the market.
Apparently, this claim is somewhat supported by the 2011 satisfaction survey conducted by PC World. Also, the survey results made Brother share the Reliability honors with two other brands. More detailed analysis of Customer Generated Content (CGC) indicates that Canon enjoys the highest reputation for Reliability, not Brother. Below is a result of Opinion Miner analysis of 32,309 customer experiences with 350 printers from major Brands. 
Personally, I understand that advertising dollars are better spent to promote a brand as opposed to a specific product, but from a user perspective not all products often exhibit the best qualities a brand may be known for, hence I think that similar models comparison is much more meaningful.
Since our approach to Customer Intelligence does not involve expensive surveys and a lot of effort for crafting minimum-biased questions, I decided to run a quick analysis of customer reviews of five similar printers to satisfy my own curiosity. I selected the printers that have been available for a purchase at least for a year, so their customers had an opportunity to experience how reliable they are over time. The second selection criterion is the printers are still current, i.e., they are still available for purchase and their customers continue to publish their experiences this month. Thirdly, each model has a representative number of customers who described their experience with it. The following printers were selected based on the conditions above that were collectively reviewed by 1,224 customers and are listed alphabetically:
- Brother HL-2270DW
- Canon Pixma MX420
- Epson WorkForce 645
- HP LaserJet Pro P1102w, and
- Lexmark Prospect Pro205
One thing Brother definitely got right – Reliability is the most important attribute of customer experience. It is measured at 20.91% of importance. Here is the link to the short video explaining how it is measured. However, this particular printer (HL-2270DW) does not measure up to Brother’s claim for highest Reliability at all as it comes short of scores earned by 3 out of 5 competitors.
Printing quality is the second most important attribute of customer experience as 17.17% of all opinions expressed by customers relate to it. Price/value attribute is third in importance (8.41%) and Usability is forth (6.49%).
Canon is the clear leader in this group as it earned the highest satisfaction scores from their customers for most important attributes (7 out of 12):
- Color/picture quality (exceeded customer expectations by 27%)
- Customer support (met customer expectations)
- Printing quality (exceeded customer expectations by 41%)
- Reliability (exceeded customer expectations by 27%)
- Scanning experience (exceeded customer expectations by 26%)
- Speed/Performance (exceeded customer expectations by 68%)
- Wireless (exceeded customer expectations by 18%)
Further details can be seen on the snapshot of the Customer Intelligence Analysis dashboard below.
If you care to dig deeper into the details, lower importance attributes and verbatim, please let me know as this information is available on request.
