FeltSo - An AI Engine That Reads Tons of Customer Reviews and Gives in Depth Analysis of Their Opinions on a Product
Did you ever have a bad purchase experience based on first few reviews & ratings of a product. If yes, FeltSo has a solution to your problem! With a vision to simplify things for consumers, Santosh Thota, Founder and CEO, FeltSo shares with BW Disrupt on how their platform takes thousands of reviews from across the web, strip it bare and presents only the highlights or the summaries of what the consumer really wants. With some real information about the product/services, their feature specific sentiment analysis and facilitating a much simpler ‘buy’ decision, read more about the platform:
Q- Tell us about your background?
A- After completing my graduation from ADAM’S Engineering College, Palwancha, I cracked GATE and completed my M. Tech from IIT Guwahati in Computer Science Engineering. Then I got placed in ORACLE India Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad and worked for 2 years. I gained more than 4 years of both academia (IIT Guwahati) and industry (ORACLE) experience in the data analytics space. Later I quit my high paying job and founded FeltSo. Initially I bootstrapped myself for more than 6 months and spent a considerable amount of time alone researching and refining the algorithms that are now a part of FeltSo.
Q- How was the idea of analyzing the customer reviews and giving in depth analysis of their opinions on a product born?
A- A few months back, I bought a mobile based on first few reviews and overall rating present on e-commerce site. But I faced overheating problem in the first few weeks of usage. Then when I went back to e-commerce site and check, the next page reviews have the overheating problem mentioned more often. That was my bad purchase experience based on first few reviews & ratings. Then I thought this is the major problem that many buyers are facing while making a purchase decision, so I validated the fact through decent survey. Having good experience in Machine learning I saw an opportunity to solve this problem of reading & analyzing reviews that lead to the foundation of FeltSo.
Q- How does FeltSo work?
A- Feltso is an artificial intelligence engine that can collect, collate and analyze thousands of reviews from the web and present a simplistic analysis of consumer sentiments for almost any product or service in the world. We launched ItsTop10.com to showcase the power of the engine and got a phenomenal response from the users.
Q- What are the typical problems that you identified in reviews? How is FeltSo solving them?
A- Research shows more than 60% of online shoppers read reviews before making any purchase, but due to the growth of internet usage and user generated content we see lots of reviews on any typical product. None of us have the time or patience to read more than 15-20 reviews. But when we read those first few reviews we always get confused, since some consumers say it’s good, some say it’s bad. Then we try to take the help of the ratings. But unfortunately, sometimes consumers say in the review that they like the product, but they don’t like the delivery service so they give 1 star, which is completely misleading. Basically, they mix product and shopping experience together while giving ratings. Most importantly, when anyone buys any product he/she has some feature preference like battery in case of mobile. But it’s very hard to find those key phrases which mentioned that particular feature in each and every review. These are the typical problems we are addressing at FeltSo.
Feltso simplifies things for consumers. It takes thousands of reviews from across the web, strips it bare and presents only the highlights or the summaries of what the consumer really wants – real information about the product/service in question; feature specific sentiment analysis; facilitating a much simpler ‘buy’ decision.
Q- Customer experience and engagement play a vital role in making the final purchase decision- What are your views on the same?
A- Yes indeed, as many surveys show that most shoppers would consider reviews extremely/very important when making a purchase, and use them to ensure quality, to gather more insights when deciding between similar products, and to get the best deal.
Q- As per your analysis, which are the 3 features of a mobile that a customer researches about the most?
A- The top features people look for while purchasing a mobile are camera, battery, performance, looks & feel, value for money.
Q- Millennials’ form a major segment of your target customers, how do you attract them to your platform?
A- Yes, our primary target customer’s age group is between 18 and 35 for ItsTop10.com. They spend lots of time online and make purchases online. Our marketing strategy to attract them include positioning - FeltSo India’s first of its kind AI engine which reads millions of customer reviews, summarize them and finally present it to the viewers in a very simple format so that they can easily analyze more customer reviews in less time. ItsTop10 India’s first top product recommendation platform based on purely customer reviews; Advertising - running targeted ads on Facebook and Google; Blogging - writing blog posts about how AI is playing a major role in commerce and also about our top10 products.
Q- What according to you, are the areas in the market where AI can be a game changer?
A- AI will be having a great impact on the health care sector with IBM alone invests more than 1 billion dollars in Watson which is now used to cure cancer in Manipal hospitals in India. Apart from Watson with the recent release of VIV you can practically build an intelligent interface for everything. Predicting sales forecast has been a great outcome of AI. Creating reports for complex data, such as financial and meteorological surveys and the list is endless with emotional intelligence coming into picture the game is being played in another dimension whole together.
Q- What were the initial challenges that you faced and how did you overcome them?
A- There are so many challenges I’ve been facing since beginning but of course that is a part of entrepreneurship. Just to highlight few, parents worry about financial stability - Being a salesperson is the first quality of entrepreneurship, so I sold my dream and vision to my parents first and convinced them; finding co-founders - is the toughest problem I’ve ever faced. I’ve built the basic FeltSo engine myself to impress the candidates from premier institutes.
Q- After mobiles, which is the next segment you are planning to get into?
A- We are looking at tablets and laptops next, but the opportunities are endless, we can expand to other electronics, restaurant industry, hotel & travel industry, you name it if it has reviews FeltSo engine can summarize them. We also got a few leads in the B2B space, so soon we are entering into the B2B space where we provide review analytics services for businesses which makes complete and strong business model.
