SADICHHYA PRADHANANG

Student ID: 11783659

CUSTOMER COMPLAINT ANALYSIS & MANAGEMENT PROPOSAL BASED ON

THE CASE STUDY OF VODAFONE CASE
Assignment 3: Data Analysis Project Proposal

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................. 1
AIM, OBJECTIVE AND POSSIBLE OUTCOME.........................................................................2
BACKGROUND.................................................................................................................... 3
RESEARCH PROJECT.......................................................................................................... 4
DATA MINING PROBLEM (BUSINESS PROBLEM)................................................................5
DATA UNDERSTANDING.................................................................................................... 5
DATA PREPARATION......................................................................................................... 6
DATA MINING METHODOLOGY.......................................................................................... 6
RESULT EVALUATION....................................................................................................... 6
DEPLOYMENT.................................................................................................................. 6
PLAN AND TIME TABLE..................................................................................................... 7
BUDGET............................................................................................................................. 8
PERSONNEL....................................................................................................................... 8

INTRODUCTION

Customer complaint Management is a part of every business. Managing the

customer complaint and providing them with good service has more to it than just
making the customers happy. Customer Service is one of the important factor that
has influence on customers buying decision, other than price, quality, availability and
brand. Once a customer is dissatisfied with the service, there is a loss of a customer
and most of all loss of revenue. In addition, unhappy customers can damage the
company reputation which results in shifting of existing customer to other services,
cannot capture the new market and loss in revenue in a great deal. Example of
Vodafone: It is a well-known fact that how Vodafone is facing problem with customer
complaints every year from 2011 to 2014 which had been published jointly by the
Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) and industry peak body
Communications Alliance, 2014.
Vodafone Australia suffered a loss of substantial profit and its mobile subscribers
over the past five years with over two million customers switching their service
provider and their count decreased by 7.6 million subscribers in 2010. This was
because of the creation of Vodafail network by an unsatisfied customer in 2010,
which was a site created for unsatisfied Vodafone customers to complaint about the
Vodafone Service. There was a loss of $603.6 million and lost 46,000 mobile
customers in the according to the current financial result taken out in 2014.(Ramli
2015)
This proposal mainly focuses on managing customer complaints to bring out
increased customer satisfaction, maximising customer value, reducing churn and
finally regenerate the revenue.
This proposal gives a solution for company like Vodafone to tackle their problem of
customer complaints and to improve their marketing outreach and sales through
good customer service. This has been done through data analysis by not only
predicting overall customers trends but also tracking individual customer trends to
provide them better solutions.

AIM, OBJECTIVE AND POSSIBLE OUTCOME

There are various ways in which customer complaint management has been done.
Most of it by analysing the overall trend of the customer. In this proposal what we
want to do here is to track the overall trend of individual customer and predict the
likeliness of a customer having a complaint. Why wait for customer to reach us to
complaint. Lets reach the customer to file their complaints or issues that they are
facing. By doing this we can retain customers, avoid customer churns, improve
brand recognition, increase subscribers and finally increase in revenue.
To make this possible we are going to generate customer complaint analysis model
which helps the company know which customers are likely to file a complaint. So that
the company can handle its customers into a satisfied customer than an unhappy
one.
The aim and objectives of this proposal has been stated below:
AIM: The main aim of this project is to develop an approach to predict the likelihood
of a customer complaint for the customer complaint management.
Objective:
1) Collect a dataset of the customer complaints details from various sources
such as companies various departments, websites, call centres and in
Vodafone case collect from Vodafail.com
2) Divide the data set into training set and test set
3) Develop a customer complaint analysis model
4) Validate and Deploy the model developed
This project is based on CRISPDM Approach. In addition to that this project is a pilot
project and is concentrated on the low coverage pilot phase.

BACKGROUND

As per Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) and industry peak body

Communication Alliance, network receives 12.2 complainants per 10,000 customers
compared to Telstra, which has 6.8 and Optus, which has 4.6. Despite of the
improvement in last 2 years to its network and product Vodafone still has more
complaints than that both Optus and Telstra combined (Baker 2014).
Due to excessive customer dissatisfaction customers have been creating their own
solution package known as Vodafail.com in 2012 where Vodafone customers
complain about Vodafone services. The highest complaints can be seen from NSW
state with 7557 complaints and the highest complaint is about reception issues with
9863 and second highest with customer poor service with 2590 complaints. (2012)
Knowledge Discovery framework and Data Mining Algorithms have been applied
successfully in many of the application domain such as commerce, geological
survey, security and telecommunications. Some of them are explained below
There has been research on Online Customer Complaints and Implications for Web
Complaint Management. The process of the research includes investigation of the
sources and causes of the online complaints, seeking effective ways to handle
complaints examining different types of products and providing guideline for
successful e-CRM.(Cho et al. 2002)
The Dodd-Frank Acts creation of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in
2010, lawmakers introduced the consumer complaint database in July 2012
underscored the CFPBs intent to fulfil two core objectives to enforcing federal
consumer protection laws more vigorously and analysing consumers, financial
services providers and market activities.(Dennis Kiefer 2013)
Hong, Zheng & Wu presented a clustering method based on genetic algorithm for
telecommunication customer subdivision. At first, data such as calling behaviour and
consuming behaviours are extracted. Then the similarities between the
multidimensional feature vectors are computed and mapped as distance between
two-dimensional planes. Finally, the distances are adjusted to approximate
similarities by genetic algorithm. (Hong, ZHENG & WU 2009)
According to BI Masterminds 2012, Vodafone India have implemented multi-layered
BI architecture InfoVision implemented by IBM, Teradata v12 as Enterprise Data
Warehouse, IBM Data Stage as ETL, IBM Tivoli Workload scheduler as Monitoring
Control, IBM Cognos as OLAP and Reporting and Oracle 11gR2 Database as
Federated Data Marts. It covered analytics, decision support system, querying and

reporting and campaigns. It was used by top management, Information technology,

customer support and marketing.(Masterminds 2012)
RESEARCH PROJECT
Effective customer complaint management offer many practical benefits other than
just retaining customers. Complaint management direct information from clients or
customers about the faulty decisions made, poor service delivered, defective
programs and various other problems that may involve risk in the company.
Customer complaint is the start of one of the kind of risk that company may have. If
you do not handle it properly or in time you will have to pay a huge cost for it. For
example, how Vodafone unhappy customer made Vodafone lose a huge customer
through Vodafail.com. If Vodafone would have taken correct measures in time, then
this could have been avoided.
Vodafone has been increasing its unsatisfied customers from 2010 till date.
However, imagine if Vodafone is able to catch hold of the customers who are going
to be unsatisfied then they can retain customers. If they can overcome with issues
that unsatisfied customers had previously given, then along with retention of
customer there might also be recovery of the lost customers. This means increased
customer satisfaction, maximising customer value, reducing churn, brand recognition
and regenerate higher revenue. This project is based on achieving these by reaching
the customer before they pick up any step to complaint we reach them and solve
their problem. This is the uniqueness of this project.
Therefore, this project concentrates on analysing the complaint dataset and
predicting the customer who likely to make a complaint.
In this project we will be following CRISPDM model as our process to solve the
problem as it is the well-known and highly used approach in data analytics.
DATA MINING PROBLEM (BUSINESS PROBLEM)
Complaints come from all over Australia. The plan is to locate the location from
where most complains have been made. As a pilot phase what we will be doing is
focusing on the location which has maximum number of complaints. For example:
According to the data collected by Vodafail.com, Vodafone has got the most
complains from NSW state with 7557 complaints.
After gathering the information, we will be focusing on customers in that particular
area and will be deploying in that area, in regard to the example the pilot phase will
be done within NSW state in the location where there are most complains based on
the area.
DATA UNDERSTANDING

This phase starts with initializing data collection and documenting its report, describe
data report, explore data report and verified the data quality report if the data need
audit or not. The data we will be utilizing with be the existing data that Vodafone
should have such as customer name, customer phone number, phone status,
network status, location, plan used, age, gender, history of complaints, social media
information and has customer complained. The only data that needs to be verified is
will be the social media information.
DATA PREPARATION
In this process, we will be selecting data, cleaning data, constructing the data,
integrating data and formatting the data.
We will be selecting the data i.e. list of data that needs to be included or excluded.
Cleaning data will ensure the quality of the data. Construction of the data will include
the construction of attributes from other attributes. Integration of the data means
merging different data. Sometimes you need to change the order of the data this
comes under formatting the data.
Except for the data from social media the data that are being collected from the
organisation itself. Data such as Customer name and phone number is needed to
identify the customer, Date of Birth and Gender is to know the demographics which
will be very useful for analysing the data, location, network state and phone state of
a customer should show if the customers in that location or any individual customer
is having trouble with the network or phone service, with the history and social media
we can see the responds towards the phone services that Vodafone has given, we
can know if it is a positive or a negative one. New instances attribute and tables
might be needed to constructed and integrated to record new data.
DATA MINING METHODOLOGY
The pre-processed dataset collected will be divided into the 65% as training set and
35% as test set to develop the classifier. The tool we will be using for this data
analysis to build the classifiers will be either Weka or Rattle depending on how large
is the dataset.
In this phase we generate the model in which we will be generating profile of the
customers through the data stored. The Design will be tested in the small area where
the test will be implemented to know about the quality and validity of the data. After
that we will prepare data to build the final model and finally the model will be
assessed if it was a success or not.
RESULT EVALUATION
In this phase the result of the model is evaluated. The process is reviewed to assure
if everything has been included and not missed out to solve business problem. Last

step in this phase is to determine the next steps that is if the model needs additional
requirements or we can move to deployment

DEPLOYMENT
After doing the pilot phase in the small area we can move to bigger area and deploy
the model created. Similarly, the same process goes again and monitor if the model
needs to be upgraded if the size of the area has been increased. This is how the
plan of deployment is done.
PLAN AND TIME TABLE
The plan below is a rough schedule of different phases of data mining project. This
phases can be repetitive; hence the duration is presented in elapsed time. This plan
will be iterative for new targeted location once the whole phase is completed for the
targeted location.
The plan has the duration of 12 months
Start Date

Phase

Duration

Feb, 2016

Business
Understanding
Data
Understanding
Data Preparation

1 month

July, 2016

Data Mining
Methodology

4 months

November, 2016

Result Evaluation

1month

December, 2016

Deployment

2 months

March, 2016
June, 2016

2.5 months
1.5 months

The above image is a gantt chart of the project. The phases and the details of the
project are listed in the table above the gantt chart.
The outcome of this project will denote the customers who are likely to have
complaints, reach the customers who are likely to complain by creating strategy
before the customer complains is filed. This will be a warning trigger to the
organization to become aware of the unsatisfied customers. If the unsatisfied
customers are handled well will turn into a satisfying customer which will be
generating revenue to the company.

BUDGET

The Project Budget shows the estimation of all the cost required to complete the
project. The budget of $13 million has been allocated according the below table.
Given, the fixed budget for the project Bottom-Up approach has been considered for
estimation of the cost of each components of the budget as it decides on how much
will it cost for each budget component and it is accumulated at last.
The estimation of the cost will be estimated according to the past projects to make it
more reasonable, realistic and achievable.
Budget Components and its estimation are shown below:
Budget Component
Personnel Expenses (such as Salary of BA, DA)
Equipment
Data collection from other social media
Other Resources Required (Material and Supplies0
Deployment cost
Total

A$ (million)
3.5
3
1.5
1.5
3.5
13

PERSONNEL
The personnel required for this project are as follows:
Top Management / Executives: Includes CEO, COO and CIO who will be involved in
sponsoring the project and approving the requirements
Data Analyst/Data Miner: The person who will be analysing the data and building the
model. They will be involved in every step of this project.
Business Analyst: They will evaluate the project and document the requirements to
be handed over to project manager. They are involved at the beginning of the project
and at the end of the project when the model is ready for evaluation and deployment.
Employees: People who work at the organization. Middle and base level employees.
They will be involved in the deployment phase to start operation of the model.