How might people respond to a telecommunications failure? Some results from a presentation to Vodafone’s Technology Operations team
On 18th June 2015 Professor John Preston presented the project results at Vodafone HQ, Newbury. As part of this exercise a poll was undertaken to find out the expectations that the team had for customer behaviour following a crisis. Below is a summary of the findings.
- As an immediate reaction after a breakdown, 88% of the respondents said they thought customers would prefer minimal bandwidth to be restored so that they could text other people.
- The most common text message considered to be sent in an emergency is ‘I am OK / all fine’ (79%). The second common message is ‘what is happening? / what happened?’ (14%).
- After three hours, the team thought that users tend to be most angry about ‘the lack of amenities which require telecommunications’ (42%) and ‘the outage and telecommunications companies’ (32%).
- All respondents replied that it should be ‘information’ if any message can be sent.
- 93% of the respondents replied ‘people would try to help others’ as ‘the likely impact of no access to emergency service (999)’.
- 50% of the respondents think ‘people would prefer information about their local services to come from a community representative’, and 31% ‘from a high level company spokesperson’.
- After twenty hours, 74% of the respondents said people would ‘continue to test the network periodically to see if it is restored’, and 23% said people would ‘continue to test the network constantly to see if it is restored’.
- People will search for local information about a crisis on Facebook (60%) or Twitter (40%).
- People will contact family and friends using Facebook (97%) or Twitter (3%).