Improving the service quality of telecommunication companies using online customer and employee review analysis

Abstract Proliferation of telecommunication companies has contributed to nearly 7 percent of the US gross domestic product and while employing over five million people. Despite offering new services and providing numerous job opportunities, the outlook of customers and the employees associated with this domain is unfavorable. The ability to understand the factors behind client and worker dissatisfaction is an essential facet for any industry. The advent of web 2.0 and the growth of social media have made the voice of customers and employees accessible to everyone using online platforms. Companies can also use this information to understand their shortcomings and the impact it has on their business. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to focus on analyzing online reviews of consumers and workers for different telecommunication companies. We have adopted a five-stage lean six sigma framework – DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control), in which the telecommunication companies under study are identified in the Define phase. The Measure stage deals with mining, preprocessing, and summarizing the online reviews pertaining to the organizations under study. Next, the bigram and trigram models are used to examine the reviews, identify key topics, and conduct the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) and root cause analyses in the Analyze stage. The Improve step involves identifying the quality violations and proposing quality-associated managerial insights for the telecommunication sector. Finally, the Control phase seeks to repeat the process after a specified interval, compensating for people’s perspectives changing over time.