An Evaluation of Performance and Competition in Customer Services on Twitter: A UK Telecoms Case Study

Nabeel Albishry, Tom Crick, Theo Tryfonas, Tesleem Fagade

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference Contribution (Conference Proceeding)

1 Citation (Scopus)
706 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

With an increasing number of consumers using social media platforms to share both their satisfaction and displeasure about the products and services they use every day, organisations with a customer service focus are recognising the importance of rapid – and genuine – online engagement with their customers. In turn, consumers increasingly judge organisations on the quality of customer service and degree of responsiveness to online queries. This paper presents an extensible framework for evaluating direct engagements of customer service teams with customers on Twitter. Furthermore, this framework provides the capability to measure and analyse indirect engagement with industry sector rivals, especially their patterns, frequency and intensity. By applying graph analysis to these Twitter interactions, our framework generates various analytical measures and visual representations, exemplified through a case study based on seven major UK telecoms companies. With a dataset consisting of 15,000 tweets and 3,500 user profiles, the results provide sustained evidence for indirect engagements between business rivals, with customer queries acting as a trigger for intense competition between companies based in the same industry sub-domain.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWWW’18 Companion, April 23–27, 2018, Lyon, France
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages1713-1720
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9781450356404
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23 Apr 2018
EventSocial Sensing and Enterprise Intelligence: Towards a Smart Enterprise Transformation - Lyon, France
Duration: 23 Apr 201823 Apr 2018

Conference

ConferenceSocial Sensing and Enterprise Intelligence
Abbreviated titleSSEI 2018
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityLyon
Period23/04/1823/04/18

Keywords

  • Customer services
  • reply chains
  • graph construction
  • social network analysis
  • Twitter
  • social media

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