The telecommunications sector is one of the key industries almost everywhere in the world. Their service connects people and provides the network for them to call, chat and to be informed via the web. This is why the actors of this field have to pay very close attention to people’s opinion on their companies. Their service is so fundamental in our lives that client complaints are easy to go viral on social media if the problem is not treated efficiently. Online media analysis company Neticle now shows how to monitor online reputation and clients’ dissatisfaction, based on Romania’s five big telco companies’ online presence.
Neticle was monitoring Orange, Digi, UPC Romania, Telekom and Vodafone between 1st of January and 30th of April in 2019. They collected every online content (news, forum discussions and social media posts or comments) in which at least one of their names had appeared. Their automated system analysed these collected texts to see what internet users think about these companies.
The number of their mentions proves the important role they play in our lives. Just within four months, almost every one of them gained ten thousands of mentions. Moreover, these mentions were mostly written on Facebook. This is important because it means their clients – or at least their target groups – frequently exchange thoughts and opinion about their services that can serve as useful feedback for the companies. So what do people talk about the telco actors?
Neticle’s chart, that shows reputation, indicates that the overall opinion about these companies is not really good, except Orange and UPC. But the more mention they get, the more their reputation tend to drop, which means people mostly write about them if they have anything to complain about. Let’s see what the key problems are that caused such a bad reputation for Digi, Telekom, and Vodafone.
One problem was common and present in all of their mentions: the complaints regarding poor telephone service. Approximately 1000 people wrote negative comments and complaints about their telephone signal services being unreliable. Most of the people claimed their cell usually goes down and there are random skips in the connection, sometimes it is impossible to call or text someone, or even use fast mobile internet and this is a big buzzkill.
When it comes to individual problems, Digi’s key pain point is the TV service. In this case, the company is facing various complaints. Most of the 290 negative mentions regarding this topic were about the quality of the screening: 4K not being sharp enough or sometimes there was no television service at all. In several other cases, people were disappointed because Digi did not have the channels they wanted to watch. In the case of Vodafone, the negative opinion about their application was outstanding. One part of the 500 complaints was mostly about general errors: users not being able to log in or the app being slow. The rest of the users phrased criticism regarding their gift game within the app. In many cases, they couldn’t actually get the deal or the award the game offered them. When it comes to Telekom, the clients’ main problem were contract issues regarding the contract. 285 people had a negative thing to say about it and most of them are not satisfied with the service they made the contract for. For example, many of them couldn’t get faster internet even when their contract was upgraded to a bigger package. The threats of terminating the contract with Telekom if they do not provide a solution for people’s issues are also common.
To see how Orange managed to maintain a non-negative reputation, Neticle revealed that although they face the same challenges as the other providers (service issues and disappointed customers), users are generally satisfied with the quality of their mobile app and gave good reviews about it while also fancy their good offers and packages. Positive reviews and comments are more frequent than complaints to them. In the case of UPC, their reputation could stay more or less neutral because they don’t get many complaints on social media, most of their mentions are questions or people debating about TV service providers in general.
The moral of this story is to always care about what people write publicly about your company. We could see that there were no specific crisis or reputation or any PR issue in the observed time. People only wrote about their everyday problems and dissatisfactions, yet it ruined the telco providers’ reputation significantly. However, if there is a tool that helps monitoring and analysing these problems quickly, increasing the customer experience quality will be really easy.