Visualization of Friday’s Cellular Blackout
Happy New Brunswick/Terry Fox/British Columbia/Natal/Civic Day everybody! I hope everyone had a safe and fun long weekend despite the monstrous cellular outage that left most Bell and Telus customers across Atlantic Canada unable to make calls or receive messages. The outage even affected a number of debit terminals, emergency response crews, and ATM machines.
Here are the Google search results taken from Google Trends of our favourite three telecom service providers across Canada on August 4th.
The spike of searches containing “Bell Aliant” and “Telus” skyrockets within minutes of the outage as customers desperate to get back online pounded their keyboards to ask Google: “WHY ME!? WHY ME!?”.
The instant surge of interest shows that the interruption occurred at approximately 10:44AM (trends are displayed at 6 minute intervals).
Searches for “Rogers” remain stable, but intriguingly high (feel free to insert your own customer service nightmare story here).
Real-time dashboards like Google Trends can be fun to look at, but also provide a lot of metrics that show what people are thinking about.
Googling something has become second nature when we need to know something NOW. When was the last time you asked a real person for directions instead of quickly thumbing the address into your pocket-sized magic machine? Likely, at this point you trust what the almighty Google Maps has to say more than a passerby.
These search trends, while fairly high level to ensure privacy, can still give an organization information that would otherwise be very difficult to collect. No longer do organizations need to ask:
“What is our customer thinking about?”
All they need to do is know the right place to look for it.
