An Interview with @NXEastAnglia
For the past 7+ years I’ve commuted almost daily between Ipswich and Colchester. This coming Monday, National Express East Anglia will cease to exist.
Although it’d be fair to say they’ve not been universally loved by commuters [1. Thanks to the complete failings of Network Rail to maintain the track, points and overhead lines, but that’s for another post…], there is one thing that I think National Express have got absolutely spot on - how they’ve used Twitter to deliver great customer service.
In my day job, I spend my time helping brands and businesses work out how social media can help them get closer to their customers. Often, experimentation is the best place to start. Social media moves fast. You can’t be afraid to try.
The way that National Express have embraced Twitter as a critical customer service tool from a simple internal experiment couldn’t be a better example of how all you need to do is be brave enough to get started.
I reached out to National Express to see if they’d be keen to share a little bit more information about how they run the account. You can see the responses to their questions below. Many thanks to them for taking the time to respond.
How many people are there on your social media team?
The NXEA Tweeters are John (JN), Kim (KG) Denis (DB) and Paul (PB). We work a mixture of shifts to answer tweets across the day.
Denis is based in our main Control room near Liverpool Street station, John is one of our Customer Relations team based in Norwich. Paul and Kim are both managers and tweet from home, the office or on the train into work to fill in the gaps!
When we started out, John and Paul fitted Tweeting in around their day jobs but as the follower numbers have grown we’ve added Denis in to help as our first dedicated Tweeter and Kim to help out.
What sort of background does the team come from?
John - I have a customer service/customer relations background. I’ve not done similar things before, but I did monitor Twitter for a considerable period of time before actually ‘going public’.
Paul – I’ve been with NXEA since March 2011 and before that I worked for the Passenger Watchdog and another London commuter train operator in various customer service roles.
How did you convince people across the business that this was a valuable tool?
We started with an initial report, monitoring how people were using Twitter to talk about us? This was really useful in highlighting the role that social media could play in helping the business and we have all had good support from within the company in positively developing our use of Twitter for our customers’ benefit.
Because Twitter is real-time it picks up the issues daily which means we get a very quick snapshot of opinion, for example at the start of the December timetable. Overall, I think the role of Twitter has been positive and useful and people are starting to think about ways they could use it in their area of work.
What tools do you use to manage the account and also pass on information internally?
We put together a report every day which includes feedback we receive on twitter (or at least as much of it as we can find). This includes not just those tweets directly addressed to us, but also under other search terms as well.
This information is then collated and reported to all areas of the business every day so we can take action on specific feedback received (such as our Fleet department who can address heating problems / train faults).
What has been the reaction from other network operators or partners?
On the whole, really positive.
National Rail Enquiries have been great to have involved because they’re there 24/7 and they’re good at passing customers who need any more detail on to us direct. Network Rail have a tricky task when there’s lots going on across the country but we appreciate the information they put out and I think our customers appreciate it too.
Have you had any interest from ‘front line’ staff like drivers and guards in becoming involved?
As the popularity of our account has grown we’ve been able to expand the team to provide some dedicated cover for Twitter. [2. Worth noting that Abellio, the new operator, are planning to give all customer service staff smart phones so they can use Twitter as a source of information.]
Denis has joined the team from his previous role at Colchester station and is based in our Control room. It’s been great having him there because he has access to information directly and he can feed customer comments straight back to the people making decisions. Denis has been a customer service supervisor for over 6 years and we felt that moving him to the Twitter team would enable us to deliver evebetter information for customers.
Are there any success stories you’re particularly proud of?
We weren’t really sure how people would respond to us being on Twitter. We still get Tweets on a regular basis from people telling us how much they like the information we put out and thanking us for our help which is great.
When we first started monitoring Twitter for NXEA we had no consistent presence. Since then, we have developed this into the service which we are now able to provide today, which I hope is beneficial to many customers, and it’s this that I’m most proud of over anything else.
Have you seen any change in how customers are contacting you since you started using Twitter?
It’s a bit too early to tell. We divert some of the more complex tweets to our customer relations team so we’re keeping an eye on what happens
