Romania’s IT&C and electronics market brings together brands with very different business models, from specialist Apple retailers and large electronics chains to telecom operators and e-commerce platforms. But how do these differences show up in the customer experience?
In the latest Staffino Public Review Spotlight, we analysed thousands of public customer reviews of six major brands operating in Romania. The results show that there is no single formula for standing out: each brand has different areas where customers respond particularly positively.
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Which Brands Were Included in the Analysis?
The analysis focused on six established IT&C and electronics brands operating in Romania: iSTYLE, Flanco, Vodafone, Altex, Orange, and eMAG.
Brands were selected based on their relevance to the Romanian IT&C market and the availability of a sufficient volume of public customer reviews to support a meaningful and comparable analysis. We also considered whether there was enough review content to identify recurring topics and evaluate sentiment across different aspects of the customer experience.
This approach allowed us to compare brands using a consistent set of customer signals, rather than relying solely on their overall star ratings.
The brands represent different parts of the market, making the comparison particularly interesting. Some compete primarily through physical retail, while others combine stores with online channels or operate predominantly through digital commerce.
Rather than looking only at overall star ratings, the analysis examined what customers actually talk about in their public reviews and which parts of the experience receive the strongest positive sentiment.
What Customer Experience Categories Did We Analyse?
To understand where each brand stands out, we looked beyond overall ratings and analysed the specific aspects of the customer experience that appear in public reviews.
The analysis covered the following categories:
Category | What it captures |
Staff & Service | How customers perceive the helpfulness, approach, and quality of service provided by employees. |
Product Range | Customer sentiment around the variety and availability of products offered. |
Product Quality | How positively customers talk about the quality and performance of the products they purchase. |
Pricing | How customers perceive prices and the value they receive for their money. |
Store Experience | Feedback about the overall experience of visiting and shopping in a physical store. |
Returns | Customer sentiment around returning products and the post-purchase experience. |
Customer Communication | How actively brands respond to and engage with customers through public reviews. |
Looking at these categories separately helps reveal the specific parts of the customer journey
that contribute to each brand’s overall perception. It also makes it possible to see where brands differentiate themselves, whether through their people, product offering, pricing, physical stores, or approach to customer feedback.
What Do Romanian Customers Value Across IT&C and Electronics Retail?
The results reveal several distinct areas of strength across the market.
Some brands stand out because of the people and service customers encounter in-store. Others differentiate themselves through product range, quality, pricing, or the physical store experience. Customer communication is another important dimension, with some brands demonstrating a particularly active approach to responding to public feedback.
This makes public reviews valuable beyond a simple star rating. They can show not only whether customers are satisfied, but what is driving that satisfaction.
How Customers See Romania’s Leading IT&C Brands
iSTYLE: Leader in Customer Communication and Staff & Service
iSTYLE stands out for the strength of its in-store customer experience.
The brand recorded a +82% sentiment in staff & service and +87% in store experience, making these two of its strongest areas in the analysis. Compared with the competitive average, that represents a +59 percentage-point advantage in staff & service and +40 percentage points in store experience. Customers also respond positively to product quality. Compared with the market, iSTYLE’s advantage in this category reaches +107.6 percentage points.
Another notable result is iSTYLE’s approach to public customer feedback. With a 97.5% review response rate, it records the highest response rate among the brands included in the analysis.
Together, these results point to a brand whose strongest customer signals are concentrated around the in-store experience, service, and perceived product quality.
Flanco: Leader in Overall Customer Sentiment
Flanco takes the top position when it comes to overall customer sentiment in the analysed market. With a net sentiment of +77.8% and an average rating of 4.52★, Flanco records the highest results on both measures among the brands included in the analysis.
The positive picture extends to specific parts of the customer experience. Customers particularly praise staff & service (+51%) and product range (+67%), suggesting that both the human side of the shopping experience and the breadth of choice contribute to the brand’s strong overall perception.
For a broad-range electronics retailer, the combination of strong overall sentiment, staff experience, and product selection makes Flanco one of the clearest standouts in the analysis.
Vodafone: Leader in Pricing and Store Experience
Vodafone stands out particularly strongly when customers talk about value.
Its +60% pricing sentiment is the highest score in the entire competitive set for this category, indicating a strongly positive perception of pricing among reviewers.
The brand also achieves a +100% sentiment in store experience, the highest possible positive score in the analysis. The returns category adds another positive signal around the post-purchase experience.
Overall, Vodafone records a +55.0% net sentiment and an average rating of 4.41★. Customer communication is another notable strength. Vodafone responds to 93.7% of public reviews, putting it among the most responsive brands in the analysis.
Altex: Leader in Consistent Customer Experience
Altex does not lead the analysis in a single category, but its results show a consistently positive performance across several important areas.
The strongest result comes from staff & service, with sentiment of +71%, the second-highest score in the market for this category. Altex also records positive sentiment for store experience (+50%) and product range (+47%), pointing to a well-rounded customer experience across both the physical shopping environment and the choice available to customers.
Its 92.4% review response rate adds another strong signal. Altex’s results show how a brand can stand out not necessarily through one exceptional category, but through solid performance across multiple customer touchpoints.
Orange: Leader in Product Range
When it comes to product variety, Orange is the clear standout in the analysis.
The brand achieves a +100% sentiment in product range, the highest single-category score recorded across all brands included in the study. That strong perception of choice is complemented by a +33% sentiment in store experience, showing that customers also respond positively to the physical shopping environment.
For customers who value having a broad selection of products to choose from, product range is clearly one of Orange’s strongest differentiators according to public reviews.
eMAG: Leader in Digital Retail Experience
eMAG brings a different type of customer experience to the comparison.
As a major e-commerce platform, its scale and accessibility distinguish it from the primarily store-based brands in the analysis. Its store experience sentiment of +36% shows that parts of the customer experience are positively reflected in public reviews even at this scale.
The results highlight the importance of looking beyond a single overall score when analysing a large digital retailer. eMAG operates across a very broad customer base and journey, meaning that public reviews can reveal specific areas of the experience that resonate with customers as well as areas where there is room to improve.
For eMAG, its scale provides a fundamentally different customer proposition: customers can access a broad IT&C market without being limited by physical store locations or opening hours.
What the Analysis Tells Us About Romania’s IT&C Market
The results show that customer experience in IT&C retail is not defined by a single factor. Different brands stand out for different reasons:
- iSTYLE distinguishes itself through staff & service, store experience, product quality, and highly active review responses.
- Flanco leads in overall net sentiment and average customer rating, supported by strong perceptions of staff and product range.
- Vodafone stands out in pricing and store experience, while also maintaining a high review response rate.
- Altex shows consistently positive results across staff & service, store experience, and product range.
- Orange leads the market in product range sentiment.
- eMAG brings a different proposition, with its large-scale digital reach and positive store experience sentiment.
This is one of the most useful things public review analysis can reveal. Two brands can operate in the same market while winning customers in completely different parts of the experience.
Looking only at an overall star rating can hide those differences. Looking at the themes customers discuss, and how positively they discuss them, provides a much more detailed picture of what is working for each brand.
How Staffino Review Radar Turns Public Reviews Into CX Insights
Public reviews contain a huge amount of customer feedback, but analysing that feedback manually can be time-consuming and difficult to scale.
Staffino Review Radar uses AI to analyse public customer reviews and turn them into structured insights. It identifies recurring topics, analyses sentiment, highlights areas of strength and weakness, and makes it possible to compare customer perceptions across brands.
Instead of simply knowing what customers rated a company, teams can explore what customers are actually talking about and where the biggest differences appear.
Whether you want to understand your own customer experience, benchmark yourself against competitors, or identify emerging topics in public feedback, Review Radar provides a faster way to turn public reviews into actionable CX intelligence.
Want to see what your customers are saying and how you compare with competitors? Explore Staffino Review Radar.
Stay on Top of Public Reviews
Review Radar monitors and analyzes public online reviews from Google, Facebook, and other platforms so you always know what customers are saying about your brand.
