Earlier this month, we reported on AT&T’s internal Twitter-tracking technology which is used by its social media support staff to listen for customer complaints regarding service issues. Tweet about a bad 3G signal or a dropped call on your iPhone, and AT&T is listening. A social media team of about 21 people across the U.S. reads and responds to those Tweets as they flow in.
However, AT&T doesn’t just focus on the “customer service” aspect of Twittered complaints – it also watches Twitter posting volume to look for red flags.
Yes – sometimes actual outages are spotted thanks to Twitter. And did you ever wonder what that looks like?
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At AT&T’s GNOC (Global Network Operations Center), screens track the volume of specific keywords on Twitter against real-time network data. For example, an increased number of complaints in a particular area is a red flag for their engineers that something could be impacting the local network.
In this photo, for instance, you can see the number of Tweets today (per hour) compared with Tweets from a week ago. A spike on this graph would indicate something that needs looking into.
Of course, a screen of Tweets is only one of the many, many screens AT&T engineers stare at all day long:
Hmm. This multi-monitor setup in my home office all of a sudden looks very sad in comparison.
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