Social Network Analysis in Telecommunications

CHAPTER 7

Assessing the Social Network Model

The most important stage of social network analysis in terms of business is to evaluate the network analysis’s possibilities for corporate applications. How can the network analysis be applied to improve the business process? How can the network measures be deployed in order to avoid churn and to improve bundle diffusion?

The network measures are assigned to the nodes and hence to the customers. Ranking the customers by their network measures, such as degree, closeness, betweenness, and influence, it is possible to highlight the influential customers in terms of relationships inside the telecommunications network. However, the influence is most often related to some particular business event. For instance, there are some influential customers who can lead others in churning. Although these customers can be recognized as leaders in terms of churning, they may not be leaders in terms of another business event, such as purchasing.

Because of this, for each business event analyzed in this particular case study, an evaluation process was performed on the network measures. Therefore, two distinct assessments for the network measure were performed separately, one for churning and another one for bundle diffusion.

Further topics will present an explanation about the codes developed to evaluate the outcomes of the network analysis according to the business events established earlier. All codes assigned to the case study are also assigned to the ...