How Indian telcos monitor brand image on social media

KOLKATA: Mobile carriers have silently turned to cool web-crawling technologies and analytics to instantly latch on to any negative customer buzz regarding their services and brand reputation across social media circles, and take corrective action.
India's No. 3 mobile carrier, Idea Cellular, said it uses analytics and web-crawling tools, to monitor and listen to customers on a 24x7 basis and provide quick resolution to their service needs.
"The tools deployed by us have the capability to scan through the feeds on Idea-owned platforms as well as in the larger space of social media," Navanit Narayan, chief service delivery officer of Idea Cellular, told ET in an emailed response. Idea's tools, he said "cover 1 billion data sources across the web and offers the best coverage for Twitter and Facebook on a realtime basis."
The Aditya Birla Group's telecom arm has deployed a comprehensive social media monitoring strategy to listen, engage and service customers in this fast-growing medium.
Noted brand specialist Harish Bijoor feels real-time access to live negative posts, tweets or blogs, "can be a strategic tool for mobile carriers since brand reputation is ultimately a cascade of consumer comments, experiences, a combination of positives and negatives."
Small wonder, Sistema Shyam Teleservices, the Indian unit of Russian conglomerate Sistema JSFC, said it has deployed a Cloud-based web crawler to capture in real-time all negative vibes and opinions floating across social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, private blogs, online customer fora to tech websites, and is addressing them through its pool of customer relationship managers.
Leveraging the power of IT for monitoring customer sentiments across social media platforms, it says, has helped Sistema Shyam hold on to its high average revenue per user (ARPU) customers and also lower customer churn.
Both Idea and Sistema Shyam said their web-crawling techniques were equipped to enable both telcos to connect with dissatisfied folks who might not merely be airing comments on the company website, Facebook page or Twitter handle.
Sistema Shyam's chief information officer Rajeev Batra told ET that the techniques had helped the pure CDMA mobile carrier "improve customer sentiment around its MTS brand by 10%" over the past four months, which had translated in higher ARPU and lower customer churn, both key metrics for measuring a telecom operator's performance.
India's leading mobile carrier Bharti Airtel declined to reply to ET's queries. But two people aware of matter said the Sunil Mittal-headed telco has "an outsourcing pact with a third-party firm that tracks online consumer sentiment and perception about the Airtel brand emanating across social media platforms". This apart, Airtel also has a customer grievance redressal mechanism on its Twitter handle.
Follow TOI Tech on Twitter >>> @toi_tech
​And like us on Facebook >>> TOI_Tech