The Voice of the Customer for Digital Telcos

In the midst of the digital revolution, the telecommunications industry is undergoing major changes. One of the changes affecting telcos is the increase in data sources from which to get customer feedback – big data, social media. Where this used to be fully controlled by companies through their call centres, websites and shops, today much feedback is expressed in social media, blogs, news sites, app stores and forums. Telefonica has taken up this challenge and opportunity, and is now systematically listening to the voice of its customers online. The problem Only a few years ago (around 2010), telcos received a hard wake-­‐up call when Whatsapp started to significantly decrease SMS revenues. Since then, the choice for over-­‐the-­‐top (OTT) products and services has multiplied by orders of magnitude, and telcos run the risk to loose the end-­‐customer contact, and to be forced into a connectivity-­‐only offering. The answer of the telecoms industry to this threat has many aspects (beyond the scope of this paper), including the launch of digital services such as financial services, security, video, etc; leaner working methodologies (lean start-­‐up); and much more customer-­‐driven development and in-­‐live management. Listening to, understanding, and acting on customer insights are key for launching, growing or (rapid) killing of customer propositions. In this work, we present our approach to systematically and automatically listen to customers on the Internet as soon as a product has gone live 1. Our approach is built around three main concepts: (i) crawling the Internet, (ii) concept identification & sentiment analysis, and (iii) visualisation, and is set up in such as way that any person with " advanced excel skills " is able to self serve the needed dashboards in a matter of hours. Crawler We use a commercial crawler of Sysomos (www.sysomos.com), which crawls social media, blogs, news, media and forums on a continuous basis. The input is any Boolean combination of keywords (and, or, not). Selecting the right search terms is important to avoid inclusion of noise. The output is a set of posts, tweets, and articles containing the specific search terms. Where possible, 1 Notice that customer insights are also key for the conception of new propositions, but that is outside the scope of this paper.