Berkeley, CA – For the sake of  providing improvement and testing directions based on customer feedback for Volvo, six students from the University of California, Berkeley have created a tool that provides reliable updates and synchronized analysis for real-time Twitter mentions on Volvo cars. 

Nowadays, the public loves to express their opinions on social media platforms. These opinions sometimes are more valuable than the surveys that are sent by the companies to their customers in providing feedback. Thus, Volvo decided to collaborate with the team from UC Berkeley to build time-sensitive models to capture the public opinions towards their products. The team implemented a social media crawler with little constraints on query per second (QPS) and duration. By doing so, the team is able to always obtain the most accurate and up-to-date social media data about Volvo and run synchronized data analytics onwards.

The team’s main mission is to construct a comprehensive information source that can reflect real-time reactions from the customers’ Twitter activity and Volvo’s Twitter presence. The dashboard provides account analytics of Volvo’s Twitter account (Figure 1) and analysis of Twitter mentions of Volvo and their products (Figure 2). Through the dashboard, the users are able to not only see collective analysis of social media contents about Volvo, but also inspect the historical track of information trends. 

Figure 1: Account Analytics Dashboard

Through this dashboard, Volvo’s teams are able to make data-driven decisions about their social media strategy such as discovering social media contents’ trends, comparing data across different hues, and thereafter analyzing customer experience. In addition, the dashboard aims to provide customizable information as well. Users will be able to customize what time period they want to inspect, which product’s mentions in Twitter they care about, and what other filter conditions they want to add onto the dashboard. This newly developed dashboard aims to provide key insights into how Volvo’s audience engages with their products, what is trending among all social media mentions about Volvo on the Internet, and whether their social media strategy is working. 

Figure 2: Twitter Mention Statistics Dashboard

In fact, real-time social media sentiment analysis has helped enterprises across different stages and industries tremendously. Building on her experience at the customer analytics team at Facebook, Shirley realized that businesses across different industries can also benefit from such tools and start optimizing operations and marketing to achieve better customer acquisition and retention. It took a while to build a fully functional dashboard that monitors real-time customer sentiment on Twitter, but the feedback was positive. Aswathy, an Innovation Engineer at Volvo, said: “This tool was eye opening. It really enabled us to understand what customers are discussing and monitor any inappropriate behaviors. We don’t need to guess what the problem is any more. The dashboard will synthesize the information and provide the most up to date analytics… overall, I’m very impressed with how well the tool is integrated into our system. Really looking forward to more updates from this talented team!”

Press Contacts
Xingyu Jin
Mingyue Tang

Github Public Repo: https://github.com/XingyuJin/volvo_twitter_analyzer 

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