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| AT&T Listening to Customer Tweets is "FOS" |
When I read the fluff press release about AT&T listening to tweets it made me want to puke with disgust. The real issue is what do you do with all of the information that you gather? AT&T simply doesn't have the capacity to do anything with the customer service complaints because they are inundated already with customer service calls that don't help network optimization one bit. The fact is the carriers have no idea what is going on with their network and its spinning out of control. If they are trying to convince social media and Twitter users that this is going to be the silver bullet that helps field complaints more efficiently they are dreaming.
We have been gathering cell phone coverage, dropped call and customer service complaints for the last 10 years. Yet, AT&T wants nothing to do with the data we gather from their customers and would rather turn a blind eye and ignore Deadcellzones.com. This press release might be one of the biggest phony media marketing hoaxes I have ever seen from the telecom giant next to their coverage map ads that are also FOS.
"Using software developed internally by its own researchers, the telecom is listening for user complaints on the social network, and then extracting the tweet's timestamp and location, mapping out where the complaint originated and comparing that data to its system logs and customer service calls. Wang explained how AT&T uses two different levels of filtering to parse the data. First, it pulls all tweets somehow related to AT&T and then it uses more specific queries to find tweets directly related to service issues. In the latter case, it looks for messages saying things like "call dropped" or "3G," for example."
Listening to customer dropped call tweets based on location is completely Full of S H I T. You don't need location-based services for a customer to tell you were their service stinks. Customers have been doing it on Deadcellzones.com for over a decade and mapping the information to give to AT&T and the FCC for free and neither will take it. DCZ has mapped over 100,000 AT&T dropped call complaints. I have been preaching for years for the carriers to adopt a consumer-generated coverage map to field complaints about where their coverage stinks. What is AT&T's solution to try and keep their customer pacified? Deploy a "Mark the Spot" app and not tie the data into your customer service or network operations department. Then pretend you are listening to customer service complaints on Twitter.
Here is what I recommend Twitter users do after reading this article. Tweet #ATTFU.
