TELECOM INDUSTRY REPORT

What Social Customers Can Tell Service Providers

and Device Manufacturers About Their Business
Attensity 2011. All rights reserved.
TELECOM INDUSTRY REPORT
Contents
Overview 3
Telecom Key Business Drivers 3
Buzz Analytics 4
Social Media Awareness for Telecom Carriers 4
The Buzz Report Summary 4
Customer Sentiment 5
Carrier Sentiment Overtime 5
Product Quality and Customer Service Issues 6
Telecom Hardware Manufacturer Product Quality Issues 6
Safety Issues Pareto 7
Customer Service Issues Report 7
Churn Analytics 8
Tracking Churn In Social Media 8
Articulation Variance Report 9
Churn Word Cloud 9
New Product Launch Monitoring 10
New Product Launch Buzz The RIM Playbook 10
Marketing Campaign Tracking 11
Marketing Campaign Awareness Report 11
Competitive Analysis 12
Survey Analytics 13
Survey Scores by Sentiment and Issues Report 13
Product Innovation 13
Captured Product Suggestions 14
Customer Behavior and Preference Profiles 14
Customer Demographics 14
Reasons for Purchase Report 14
Customer Engagement Response Queues 15
Example Social Queues Tracking Attrition 16
Summary
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Overview
Telecom service providers and mobile device manufacturers recognize that their customers are both
passionate and vocal about their products and services. Whether those customers are anticipating the
release of the newest smartphone, downloading the latest apps or comparing coverage in their service
areas, they are sharing their experiences in conversations every day. These conversations take place
both directly with the company through emails, phone calls and surveys, or indirectly online as
customers share their opinions on review sites, blog about their experiences or solicit recommendations
from friends on social networks.
In the past, when these conversations were limited to direct interactions with the company, the
company could deal with it in its own timeframe, directly and one on one with the customer. Response
times could be anywhere from minutes to days, depending on the question or issue. Today, a major shift
is occurring in the way customers interact with their service and device providers. Driven by the
widespread adoption of mobile devices and social media, customer conversations are multiplying, they
are often shared publicly, and they can quickly go viral.
Buried in these millions of offline and online conversations is a wealth of customer intelligence that can
provide critical insights into key telecom business drivers. Until recently, however, providers were
limited to analyzing only structured data contained within their business systemsthings like customer
names, contact information, device data, and so forth. Now, recent advances in text analytics have
made it possible for companies to analyze unstructured text from these customer conversations
captured in call center notes, emails and surveys, and even in online sources such as blogs, review sites
and social media.
Customer conversations contain a wealth of actionable business data.
Using advanced text analytics technology, leading service providers and device manufacturers are
mining customer conversations for business intelligence not captured in their structured business
systems. They are capturing actionable data such as customer sentiment, product quality or service
issues, reasons for churn, competitive data and more. And using the results of that analysis, they are
engaging proactively with customers across multiple channels, including email, web, call center and in
social media.
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Overview of social media coverage of top telecom carriers.
Attensity, a leading provider of text analytics solutions for customer experience management, is at the
forefront of this trend. In a recent analysis of social media, Attensity captured a snapshot of this
customer intelligence from publicly available online sources, including social media. The data was from
the first quarter of 2011 and focused on North American telecommunications carriers and device
manufacturers. The following report provides an overview of the types of customer intelligence and
key business drivers that telecom carriers and hardware providers can access using advanced text
analytics.
Buzz Analytics
If you are selling telecommunications devices or services, your brand and products are being discussed
online every day. In an analysis lasting approximately 60 days, thousands of posts were discovered
mentioning the major and minor telecommunications carriers and device providers in North America.
These posts included customer sentiment about new products, opinions of offerings, customer service
complaints and more. The first set of reports show the sheer volume of discussions about these
leading companies and their competitors:
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Utilizing a buzz monitoring report like the one on the previous page, providers can get a real-time
snapshot of the volume of coverage by any variable they specify, including brand name, product name,
campaign name and more. For example, the above report shows the number of comments by company
name, as well as the impact and engagement assessment of the buzz about the brand. The report also
includes comparative views, share of coverage, buzz velocity (has the buzz gone up or down during a
period of time?), location of the buzz and more.
In this report, Verizon had the most buzz with over 111,000 mentions in just 30 days. Note that this data
represents a specific slice of time and will change depending on the market forces at work. For example,
this data snapshot was taken during Verizons launch of the iPhone4, which created a significant spike in
the buzz about the Verizon brand. That may seem an obvious conclusion. A better question might be:
what specifically are these customers talking about?
Understanding Customer Sentiment
Do your customers like you? Do they prefer your competition? Are your marketing messages
resonating? If so, why? If not, what are their issues? Sentiment analysis helps organizations understand
what customers think about their brand and products. The ability to track customer sentiment gives
device and service providers the insight they need to determine where and how to prioritize change.
This report shows customer sentiment by carrier, and a snapshot of sentiment over time.
Discovering the Why Behind Customer Comments
Knowing whether customers feel positively or negatively about their brand, products or services gives
telecom companies a high-level view of the health of the business. But what are the issues that are
driving that sentiment? These are the key details service providers and device manufacturers need to
know to make needed changes and drive their business forward.
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Some of the most impactful insights that organizations can get from analyzing online customer
conversations is an early view into product quality and customer service issues. Research shows that
over 50% of online mentions of companies and their products are related to product and service issues.
The ability to understand the impact of quality issues and get early warning of those issues is a
significant area of opportunity to save costs and improve the customer experience.
Todays empowered customers
often turn to the Internet when
they encounter a problem with a
product or service. By tracking
issues over time, providers can get
a sense of both emerging issues
and issues that have gone from a
normal level of complaint to a
serious level. Armed with this
knowledge, the manufacturer or
provider can take action to
prevent a minor issue from
spiraling into a customer service
or public relations disaster. This
might mean augmenting its
service team, or providing FAQs
and fix-it information on the
companys support web site to
deflect calls and make the
information easily accessible to
customers.
Learning about these issues early and tracking them over time to improve customer service, and
ultimately, products, can result in significant cost savings, but because the detail about these issues
is usually hidden in textual feedback, understanding what the issues are and their magnitude can be
challenging.
Using advanced analytics, hardware manufacturers can identify specific product quality issues. For
example, the above report shows a summary of the top issues identified by customers in social
media regarding handset quality issues. First shown are the overall general negative issues
discussed about the handset. Second to these general complaints are issues with the battery life,
which represents one of the top complaints across brands including the iPhone, the HTC, the
Blackberry Storm and others. Other issues include small button keys, the camera not working and
issues with the screen display.
Device manufacturers can use customer analytics to track
quality issues over time.
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In some cases, the manufacturer might even identify issues that could pose a safety threat. The pareto
analysis below shows how manufacturers can use customer analytics to track a product quality issue
over time, this example show the progression of a potentially dangerous issue around a new device
that gets hot during use. The analysis chart tracks the issue and the frequency with which the issue
was mentioned over time.
In the same way, providers and handset manufacturers can discover and track issues and hot spots to
show the change in those issues over time and track their impact on sentiment and satisfaction. This
gives the manufacturer the opportunity to take action, before the problem becomes serious. This
feedback can be mined in real time from social media and other online sources, as well as from the
companys own internal sources like surveys, emails and call center notes. The second chart below
shows an issue tracked overtime and its impact on sentiment by carrier.
Device manufacturers can use customer analytics to track quality issues over time.
Carriers can identify the specific customer service issues affecting customer sentiment.
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Detecting Intent to Churn
Understanding and then managing subscriber churn before it happens is critical to the success of any
telecom service provider. Telecommunications regulations have made it easier than ever before to
switch carriers, and the frequent introduction of new faster and more feature-packed devices,
combined with compelling incentives, are encouraging subscribers to switch more frequently. Churn
happens in both directions, both to and away from the provider. The ability to identify which
customers are getting ready to make a switch, understand why, catch them in the process and
connect with them to provide offers to mitigate the change or to encourage a move to your service
provides both opportunities to win new customers and retain existing customers, driving new
revenues and preserving existing relationships.
The customer churn report here shows publicly available data drawn from social media sources of
conversations around intent to churn between two leading service providers. These conversations are
taking place every day online, yet carriers often lack the tools to monitor, analyze and act on them. With
advanced text analytics solutions, providers can not only identify and prevent churn, they can spot
opportunities to win new business from customers frustrated with the competitions products or
services.
Customer conversations that mention intent to churn between two leading service providers.
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The most challenging part of getting to insight in large volumes of customer conversation data is the
great variances in the way people say things. Using advanced text analytics solutions, companies can
now automatically aggregate mentions of churn that are articulated in different ways into a single
category. In the sample report shown here, churn articulation includes comments such as:
I am going to switch.
I am going to move carriers.
I am going to jump carriers.
The software automatically identifies
these different variations as relating to
churn and aggregates them into a
single churn category which can then
be analyzed and routed to agents for
action.
Automatically Discover Topics
of Conversation
Telecom carriers and device manu-
facturers are increasingly aware that
customer conversations are taking
place online in social media, on blogs
and review sites, in customer forums,
etc. Many are taking strides to monitor
and search for topics of conversation
they know are of interest.
Advanced text analytics technologies capture the
various ways customer express opinion.
But what about those issues they havent identified yet? While traditional search and text analytics
systems rely on building exhaustive keyword lists, newer advanced analytics technology gives providers
the ability to automatically discover topics of conversation as they are happening. When product issues
and service missteps can quickly go viral, the ability to get early warning of issues and spot trends is fast
becoming a key competitive differentiator.
Word clouds give telecom operators an easy way to see
which customer topics are trending at a glance. The larger
words show the topics with the most number of
comments. Easy to use reports and dashboards like this are
an essential component of customer analytics systems, and
give marketers and customer service organizations an easy
way to monitor customer conversations and spot key
trends.
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Monitoring the Success of a New Product Launch
In the telecom industry, new product and service introductions are expensive, requiring the
coordination of multiple front end and back end systems, product development cycles, capital
investment, marketing campaign development, and training for contact center agents, to name just
a few factors. Leveraging customer data throughout these processes is critical to success, but most
providers have to wade through long research cycles that include panels, focus groups and surveys.
Even then, success is anything but certain.
Using advanced text analytics, providers and manufacturers can now get fast feedback on new
product introductions directly from the market, and use that intelligence to adjust their launch
strategies to the realities of the market. Near real time feedback can help the provider course
correct, making changes to aspects of the product and offering that can make the critical difference
between a product launch that falls flat and one that is a major hit. Understanding customer
opinion early in the process gives providers the insight they need to anticipate demand and even
make changes to inventory and campaigns based on customer feedback. Included here are just a
few examples of the kinds of analysis providers and manufacturers can conduct around new product
introductions.
Marketers can use advanced customer analytics to monitor the success of new product launches.
Understanding customer opinion early in the process gives providers the
insight they need to anticipate demand, and even make changes to
inventory and campaigns based on customer feedback.
Understanding the Impact of Marketing Campaigns
Telecom service providers and device manufacturers spend millions to market their products and
services, and to drive traffic to their web sites and into their stores. Other than waiting for the sales
reports, how can they tell if it is working? Surveys and other market research methods only tell half
the story. The detailed feedback found in social media from customer opinions and ideas around a new
marketing campaign can be strikingand providers can use this feedback to mold future campaigns or
second and third waves of an existing campaign.
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The detailed feedback from customer opinions and ideas
around a new marketing campaign can be striking.
By monitoring customer conversations, marketers can use feedback to fine-tune campaigns.
For example, the report shown on the prior page shows customer conversations around Verizons
Rule the Air campaign, including share of coverage in different media such as blogs, forums, online
news and video sites. Marketers can use this information to better plan and fine tune campaigns, and
direct their marketing efforts and dollars to the channels that offer the best return on their
investment.
Analyzing the Competition
Before the advent of advanced text analytics, competitive analysis was typically carried out by
consultants paid to pick around in the competitors garbage can, website or stores. Or they might
send out a survey to their customers to find out more about their pricing, marketing, products and
customer opinion. While those tactics can produce some very interesting insights, leveraging social
media to get a real view into what the market thinks presents an enormous opportunity.
Competitive churn analysis among the top carriers.
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Telecom carriers and manufacturers can measure churn rates and many other
variables versus their competitors to get a real-time view into what the market
thinks of their products and services. They can even drill down into the details
to get a deep understanding of the competition.
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Survey Analytics
Surveys are an important tool that many device and service providers use to track customer
feedback over time. Using survey metrics like customer satisfaction or Net Promoter scores enables
the business to track changes in customer satisfaction over time. Along with survey questions, it is
critical to also provide detail behind the scores. Why does in-store service continually score lower
than average? Why are some customers not inclined to recommend a particular handset?
Product Innovation
The development of new product ideas has always been something of a black art. The typical
approach is to get your most creative product engineers and ideators involved in a project, add a little
bit of market research and creative juice, and out comes a product! While having excellent product
innovators is critical to any companys success, the opportunity to tap customer conversations for
suggestions, ideas for new products and product changes can provide valuable insights into what to
build and what not to build next. Along with traditional market research, customers are ideating
every day online.
Using survey metrics like customer satisfaction or Net Promoter scores enables the business to track
changes in customer satisfaction over time and to understand the why behind the score.
Net Promoter scores enable the business to track
changes in customer satisfaction over time.
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Customer Behavior and Preference Profiles
The verbatim of customer conversations about specific products and services can be quite revealing in
terms of the detail customers provide about themselves, the reasons they buy, who they buy for and
more. While demographic and behavioral data is telling, customer conversations often deliver a degree
of granularity that can be used to better segment and market to customers.
Telecom leaders are using
advanced customer analytics to
profile customer behavior and
preferences.
Mining conversations for suggestions can provide a valuable tool for product development.
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Customer Engagement Response Queues
While analyzing customer conversations is critical, it is just the first step. The ability to drive action
based on these insights based on established business processes is critical to success in todays
competitive telecommunications market. Many companies are struggling with how to engage with
their customers in social media. It can be a daunting challenge, yet for todays hyper-connected
customers, the ability to engage through social media is quickly moving from a novelty to an
expected piece of the customer experience.
Companies that dont actively engage with customers through these channels will soon find
themselves at a disadvantage. Using customer analytics to drive proactive response is a key
capability telecom providers need to turn insight into action. Todays advanced customer analytics
and engagement platforms allow providers to transform customer conversations into action.
By routing customer conversations into different queues from any channel, including social media,
different stakeholders throughout the enterprise can engage customers proactively, while the system
tracks interaction history.
The ability to engage through social media is quickly moving from
a novelty to an expected piece of the customer experience
Summary
There is a wealth of user-generated content in social media, email, CRM notes, surveys and more being
created every day about your company, your products, and your competition. Too often, this vital
information goes underutilized and virtually untapped as a valuable asset.
However, through the power of todays advanced text analytics solutions, telecom providers and device
manufacturers can now conduct deep analytics and use those insights to drive key business decisions,
deliver proactive service, and formulate competitive business strategies.
The key to unlocking this wealth of information lies in a deep understanding of languagethe ability to
accurately pull out sentiment, key issues, and relationshipsand in the ability to express those insights
in easy-to-use business oriented applications. This report is just a small glimpse into the kind of analytics
and engagement capabilities that telecom businesses can achieve.
For more information about the information contained in this report, Attensitys text analytics solutions
or to get a private demonstration, please contact sales@attensity.com, or visit us online:
Website: www.attensity.com
Blog: http://blog.attensity.com/
Twitter: twitter.com/Attensity
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/attensity
About Attensity
Attensity helps the worlds leading brands leverage customer conversations as a business asset. Using Attensitys
integrated suite of customer analytics and response applications, organizations can tap the wealth of data stored
in both internal and online sources, and use that information to improve the customer experience with their
brands. Attensitys award-winning Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions are built on a massively
scalable text analytics platform that enables organizations to listen, analyze, relate and act on customer
conversations, no matter where they take place. From its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., and Kaiserslautern,
Germany, Attensity is powering the customer experience strategies of companies such as Charles Schwab,
Citigroup, HP, JetBlue, Lloyds Banking Group, Siemens, Starwood Resorts, Travelocity and Whirlpool.
2011 Attensity. All rights reserved. Attensity, First Person Intelligence and Exhaustive Extraction are trademarks
of Attensity Group in the United States and/or other countries. Other brand and product names are trademarks or
registered trademarks of their respective holders. Information is subject to change without notice.
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