Earlier this week, my colleagues from the University of Bristol presented a joint paper entitled: An Evaluation of Performance and Competition in Customer Services on Twitter: A UK Telecoms Case Study at Social Sensing and Enterprise Intelligence: Toward A Smart Enterprise Transformation, an international workshop as part of The Web Conference 2018 in Lyon. This built upon our recent work on obtaining insight from big social datasets; in this case analysing customer service interactions on Twitter for some of the major UK telecoms operators.
The abstract of the paper is below; you can read the full paper (or download a PDF) via the ACM Digital Library or our GitHub repo:
An Evaluation of Performance and Competition in Customer Services on Twitter: A UK Telecoms Case Study
Nabeel Albishry, Tom Crick, Theo Tryfonas and Tesleem Fagade
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.
(also see: Publications)
Digital, Data & Policy 
You have prompted me to reflect on my experience in using Twitter to complain. I could name a list of companies who are all mouth and no trousers but that would take too long; the businesses who are poor socially usually fail across the board, eventually. It is interesting to see, despite the eloquence and wit of the CTO of Facebook, on BBC Parliament lately, their lack of R in this R&D topic. Indeed as Recode (part of Vox Media) shows the CEOs of Silicon Valley seem to be not sure either of the landscape despite being cosy with rivals etc etc