Dr. Carlos Pinheiro works harder to share his knowledge than anyone else I know. Last year I saw him speak at industry conferences three times.  This year he will be on the road again speaking in Orlando (SAS Global Forum), Cologne (Analytics 2012), and Dublin (TMForum). In this recent webinar, Carlos talks with me about the benefits of his analysis into the social networks of telecom subscribers.

Over the years Carlos has used SAS to solve a diverse range of telecom business problems including customer churn, revenue assurance, collections, and fraud.  So naturally I was delighted when Stacey Hamilton from SAS publishing asked me to review Carlos’s book titled: Social Networking Analysis in Telecommunications. But I confess that at the time I was skeptical of the business benefits.

The concept is straight forward enough: use call detail records to measure how well connected a customer is.  Since every customer (including customers on rival networks), could potentially call anyone else, you can think of this as a very large but sparsely populated matrix.  Imagine a spreadsheet with millions of rows and columns (one for every phone) and then tally-up the number, duration, direction, of all the connections. The matrix would appear to be almost empty. But some individuals will clearly stand out as being much better connected than average people. These people are more likely to be influential and knowing that is helpful in combating customer attrition and selling new products and services.

To see how these key people propagate their influence through a social network - and learn why I'm no longer a skeptic, watch the webinar.  If you submit a comment or question on this blog entry, I will share it with Carlos and give you an answer.