The electronics/technology sector ranks second on a list of industries that elicit the most emotional language among online commenters, according to an analysis of online reviews from Trustpilot conducted by online learning provider Preply. The electronics/technology sector was outranked only by the travel/vacation sector. What is causing anger among these online consumers?
The Trustpilot dataset — which consists of brands with ratings of 4.5 or less and at least 500 reviews during the past year — was analyzed using Emotion, a dataset available through Hugging Face, which calls itself an advocate for “good machine learning.”
As part of that research, Preply analyzed the overall anger quotient for each brand to find out the top 100 anger-provoking brands.
AT&T was number 18 out of 20. And a spokesperson for Preply told Telecompetitor that Charter’s Spectrum brand and Verizon Wireless also were among the electronic/tech companies that were found to elicit the most online anger.
The telecommunications industry has long struggled with customer satisfaction. Indeed, one segment — cable — has a lengthy history of being a punchline for poor service. The industry has attempted to respond with technology that enables customer service representatives to more quickly respond to customer concerns, and reduce the amount of anger with online consumers. The study suggests that customer service still is a big issue.
“Oftentimes reviewers state a certain company department in their emotional review,” according to a Preply post about the online anger research. “We analyzed how often departments were mentioned to find out which company departments are tied most to emotional reviews. Customer service was the top company department mentioned in emotional reviews, followed by product and then shipping.”
Other key takeaways:
- “Fees,” “beware,” and “lied” are the emotional language terms used most frequently in reviews.
- “Scam,” “fraud,” and “joke” are the main accusatorial words used in reviews.
- Customer service is the chief complaint among consumers, more so than the actual product or service that consumers received.
In contrasting research in May, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) found that AT&T had the highest satisfaction score among mobile network operators. It reached 75 on a 100-point scale. It was followed by T-Mobile (74), Verizon (73) and U.S. Cellular (70).
