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

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.