Mother, Father Or Your Beloved – Who Do You Miss The Most? June 23rd, 2011  

Here at Rebtel, I spend part of my time as an Operational Controller trying to predict our users’ behavior in order to not only identify interesting opportunities, but also to predict possible calling issues that might arise from increased volume and prevent them before they happen.

Knowing how our calling traffic is affected by holidays, seasonal behavior or even large sporting events is vital to understanding the market and being able to create fun, interesting and relevant campaigns that people will like and respond to.

Therefore, it’s not only out of my own personal curiosity that it becomes interesting to know which days are the most important for our users to make a call on; Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or Valentine’s Day.

A lot of the people that use our service are first-generation immigrants. They’ve left their homes and relocated to the U.S. or some other western country due to, for instance, work or school obligations. In some cases, their families are still back home, which tends to make holidays like Mother’s or Valentine’s Day that much more important than usual due to the time they’re forced to spend apart.

Valentine’s Day
The overall Rebtel traffic increased with 7% compared to the preceding Monday, making it larger than most bank holidays. On a country level, the top three largest increases happened in Iran, Liberia and Nepal. All the world’s continents are in fact represented in the top ten largest increases, making it one of the most globally recognized holidays there are.

Mother’s Day
Rebtel’s overall traffic was up with 14% compared to a normal day, which makes Mother’s Day one of the most important holidays of the year for our users. The increase is global, but highly individual. Latin America, for example, saw the largest increase percentage wise, where eight of the ten largest increases were reported. Out of all, Cuba had the very highest increase, with an impressive 214% growth in calling volume compared to normal.

Father’s Day
Our overall traffic this year was 8% compared to the Sunday the week before. Although the increase was smaller than on Valentine’s Day, it’s still significant and well spread out. As with Mother’s Day, calls originating in Latin American countries once again grew the most and the Cubanso once again topped the list with the highest individual increase on a country level of 199%.

To summarize, if you look at the differences in calling volume as an indicator of importance of the relationships with the people these three holidays are meant to celebrate, our mothers are by far the most important to us. With that said and considering that Father’s Day was just a few days ago on June 19th, I would kindly like to urge each and everyone of you to give some well deserved appreciation to your dads as well

Happy calling!

By: Mikael Rosengren Tags: father's day, Links, mikael rosengren, mother's day, valentine's day