Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst at Recon Analytics, is a respected telecom expert, often cited by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNBC, NPR, PBS, and CNN. His research has also been cited in six Annual Mobile Wireless Competition Reports to Congress.
While Recon Analytics has historically provided the telecommunications industry with research and consulting services, PR Vibes sat down with Entner to find out more about a new initiative called “Tableau,” and how it can help marketers at telecom companies fine-tune their strategies.
PR Vibes: What is Tableau?
Roger Entner: Over the last few years, Recon Analytics has supercharged its data game with the creation of a near real-time, super-flexible analysis platform that collects data from a panel of 28 million survey respondents. It’s centered around delivering the data and insights via what we call Tableau dashboards. Almost 10,000 people are queried every week on various aspects of their telecom experiences, with about 400,000 respondents contacted every year overall. That data is presented for Recon Analytics’ clients in a visually stunning, clickable way, featuring intuitive navigation, and aspects like heat maps that offer at-a-glance views of the data sorted by various metrics.
PR Vibes: What kind of intel are you pulling into your Tableau consumer dashboards?
Roger Entner: On the consumer side, we do two surveys every single week with about 4,000 responses each; one is focused on consumer mobile customers, and one is focused on home internet customers. We ask connected consumer questions like, what Apple Watch or gaming console do you have? And we ask about distribution, and how happy they are with their sales experience; as well as surveying on product launches, and basics like how happy they are with their service or call quality. We also collect demographics. And we are passively collecting their device hardware IDs, because if you ask the average customer about what phone they have, they can’t tell you.
PR Vibes: How granular can the data get?
Roger Entner: We offer our component net promoter score [a market research metric that tracks the likelihood a customer would recommend a company, product, or a service to a friend or colleague] that gives us valuable insights how customers view a service offer, along 16 different components of how customers and carriers are interacting. What’s really neat is that you can click within the Tableau dashboard to see subsegments of the data, and determine where your pain points are, as well as slice-and-dice the data among every other element that we display on the dashboard. There are segments on technical delivery and service provisioning, where most carriers do well. And then you can zoom in on data on the in-store experience, or website-based customer service, which tends to have mixed reactions from respondents. The moment that a carrier needs to interact with their customers, things can get hairy. Having this intel, refreshed weekly, helps them be proactive in fixing that.
We can also slice the data by technology, handset, age, race, income level, and more. We can even look at how satisfaction looks in cities vs. suburbia vs. rural, and in individual states and counties.
PR Vibes: On the technology side, what are some of the things that the data can tell you?
Roger Entner: If there are people reporting that they’re unhappy with their service quality, we’re able to drill down and see the reasons for that. Is it the router? Is it the connection from the tower? Is it the phone? Is it the chipset in the phone? So the carrier can determine whether users of certain chipsets (which can be found in iPhones and Samsung Galaxies alike) have worse service experiences, and make decisions accordingly. There are satisfaction indexes viewable by all of these aspects.
PR Vibes: How is this data analysis differentiated from what carriers can collect and analyze internally?
Roger Entner: The carriers can measure a lot of their customer’s experience. We provide them with telecom customers’ perceptions. Providers have a harder time comparing themselves with the other players. Every carrier knows how happy their customers are when they went to their own stores, because they survey them. But we can tell them how happy their customers were when they went to their competitors’ stores, or how happy their competitors’ customers are after the purchasing experience. All of this data is provided following a consistent and vetted process.
We also cover all of the lines of business for carriers: enterprises, consumer, mobile, fixed, prepaid, postpaid, and how this all flows together. Within our Tableau dashboard, we have one holistic point of view across those services, so if you’re a senior decision maker at an operator, you can connect the dots.
That weekly cadence is a big differentiator too. It’s almost unfair when one competitor has access to weekly insights and the other gets quarterly or even only annual data. The time-to-market advantage is significant with Tableau.
PR Vibes: Do you have a real-world example of how this data can be used for critical marketing decisions?
Roger Entner: Yes, for example, when Charter Communications launched its Spectrum Life Unlimited offer, our clients had, within a week, granular insights into what elements of the offer were working, what were not working, for those that adopted the plan. We could also see what impact it would have on Charter’s customer base and those of other carriers’. It gave them the necessary insights on if and how they should or should not react to that launch.
PR Vibes: What was the main driver for creating this resource for your operator clients?
Roger Entner: Executives must make decisions faster than ever before. There was nothing in the market that allowed telecom executives to make near real-time, fact-based decisions. Our offer is highly differentiated, and we are continuously improving and innovating our offer to provide our clients with more value every year. It’s an incredible resource, and we’re excited to share it.
If companies are interested, we are excited to show them how we can help them.