Deutsche Telekom built a sophisticated crisis management Command Center powered by live social listening. The leading communication service provider was able to track the use of keywords and phrases related to its brand and products. Reacting immediately, stopping a minor issue escalating into a major crisis.
Table of contents
- Background - crisis management with a Command Center
- Challenge - Command Center powered by social listening
- Solution - social listening 24/7/365
- Result - risk management leads to cost savings
- Outlook
Background - crisis management with a Command Center
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies with operations spanning over 156 million mobile customers, 29 million fixed network lines, and more than 18 million broadband lines. The ability to manage a crisis effectively is pivotal for such a global, public corporation and the speed and reach of social media has changed the game when it comes to crisis management.
Each day. Each hour that a crisis is left to intensify can lead to share prices falling and irreparable damage to carefully cultivated brand reputations.
To prevent such situations from spiralling out of control, Deutsche Telekom work with a Command Center powered by Talkwalker’s real-time social listening. As one of three departments of Cyber Defence and Situation Management (part of Enterprise Security of Deutsche Telekom AG), the Command Center is the “intelligent alarm” of the enterprise.
One of the key functions of the Command Center is to give all Deutsche Telekom employees the information they need to stay on top of any crisis situation in real-time.
Command Center powered by social listening
Detecting crisis signals
For their wide-ranging crisis management needs, Deutsche Telekom wanted a powerful social listening solution that would ensure that their Command Center was able to quickly and efficiently detect crisis signals across millions of brand mentions online.
Deutsche Telekom’s key needs:
- Track known crisis situations in real-time and be alerted to potential issues
- Monitor multiple Twitter and Facebook channels to stay on top of the social discussion
- Analyze large volumes of social data at high speed in order to react quickly and effectively
- Have a solution that is easy to use and configure so teams with varying levels of social media data knowledge can use the technology
In Talkwalker, Deutsche Telekom found a social listening platform that powered a Command Center, fulfilling all of their requirements. Providing extra functionality to reveal key crisis insights.
Social listening 24/7/365
Understanding the known and the unknown
Deutsche Telekom identified two main forms a crisis can take:
- #1 Monitoring and managing a known situation, such as a service disruption or a product recall
- #2 Detecting potential problems as they emerge or monitoring as yet “unknown” situations
Deutsche Telekom’s state of the art Command Center guarantees exhaustive coverage of both scenarios.
Deutsche Telekom’s social listening powered Command Center.
For known issues, the Command Center monitors buzz across the web, focusing on owned channels - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, company website, etc. Talkwalker’s extensive owned-channel monitoring analytics ensures in-depth analysis of the buzz, engagement, reach, and sentiment of social discussions as well as the diffusion of social media messages throughout the web.
Deutsche Telekom focuses monitoring on their own national and international social channels, particularly Facebook and Twitter, (e.g. for T-Mobile Austria, Deutsche Telekom AG) to detect any unusual activity at an early stage. Social media listening then remains in place until the issue has been fully resolved.
For situations of which they have limited or no knowledge, Deutsche Telekom relies on continuous surveillance to immediately detect small changes and issues. The monitoring runs constantly in the background, extending beyond owned media. Telekom also tracks compliance and service related keywords such as “outages”, “hacks”, “fraud”, and “scam”.
To track even the smallest problems at an early stage, Deutsche Telekom uses social data based alerts that send automated messages when unusual activity is detected. Talkwalker delivers alerts for terms critical to the security of the company such as “amok”, “threat”, “bomb”, “bribe”, etc. Once this data has been collected and analyzed, the next pivotal stage is distributing this knowledge.
Sharing insights throughout the enterprise
For Deutsche Telekom, the most important aspect of the company’s social media listening process is not the gathering of data itself, but how this data is used. Forwarding all important information to the person in charge is key. To do this effectively, they use Talkwalker’s social media reporting functions.
“For this purpose, we use different configurations of the reporting functionality. Depending on recipient, area or topic, an individual report is created.” “Since the reports for different departments serve different purposes, it’s extremely important for us to be able to individualize them.”
Robert Schwerdtner, former Crisis Manager at Deutsche Telekom AG
It is this fast and efficient method of spreading social insights to relevant departments that is especially important during a crisis, when every department needs to have the right information at the right time to act effectively.
This also helps to ensure that data doesn’t get siloed in particular departments and that critical knowledge is shared across all the departments that may find it useful.
Risk management leads to cost savings
As a market leader operating worldwide, Deutsche Telekom needs to immediately be aware of potential risks and issues, and to be able to fix them with minimal impact on its brand reputation. With Talkwalker, Deutsche Telekom has been able to put in place an ambitious project to keep a close eye on all relevant conversations and create automatic notifications for all stakeholders within the company.
Real-time monitoring has enabled the company to manage known issues more effectively and detect emerging problems before they get out of hand. Efficient reporting has helped Deutsche Telekom to save time and ensure all teams are on the same page.
For Deutsche Telekom, the implementation of Talkwalker social listening has led to significant cost savings with minimized corporate risk. The Command Center has helped to avert crises and managed known and unknown issues efficiently, preventing potential sales losses and drops in share price.
Outlook
With a proven track record of successful social listening using Talkwalker, Deutsche Telekom now plans to extend its monitoring. The company will apply more of Talkwalker’s functionalities in the near future, adding a B2B component to its overall monitoring and analytics.
Crisis management in the age of social media has become a major task for global organizations like Deutsche Telekom. Powerful social listening ensures that pivotal social conversations are understood and acted upon by all relevant departments in the enterprise.
