Listen to Me if You can: Tracking User Experience of Mobile Network on Social Media

摘要

Social media sites such as Twitter continue to grow at a fast pace. People of all generations use social media to exchange messages and share experiences of their life in a timely fashion. Most of these sites make their data available. An intriguing question is can we exploit this real-time and massive data-flow to improve business in a measurable way. In this paper, we are particularly interested in tweets (Twitter messages) that are relevant to mobile network performance. We compare tweets with a more traditional source of user experience, i.e., customer care tickets, and correlate both of them with a list of major network incidents. From our study, we have the following observations. First, Twitter users and users who call customer service tend to report different types of performance issues. Second, we observe that tweets typically appear more rapidly in response to network problems than customer tickets. They also appear to respond to a wider range of network issues. Third, significant spikes in the number of tweets appear to indicate short term performance impairments which are not reported in our current list of major network incidents. These observations together indicate that Twitter is an attractive, complementary source for monitoring service performance and its impact on user experience.