Hooo boy, this makes for interesting reading
I am currently a temp Social Media Advisor for Northern. I've been doing it on and off for the last year or so to help out, and full time since the start of October. Some of you may have interacted with me already. Apologies if I've ever let you down
I feel like I should give an insight into what the job is like. At Northern we have a team of four (currently five as one person is training) - this compared to nine for CrossCountry/GCR (who also do control roles as part of their position), but only two for ATW. I think VTEC have about four of five as well. We work in York ROC, as do VTEC's team. We have two standard shifts in the day - 06:00-14:45 and 13:15-22:00. It's seven days on, two off, seven on, two off, seven on, five off, so we work every day of the week
The desk was set up about five years ago when Twitter was in its infancy. We currently use a website called Conversocial which allows us to see, categorise and respond to messages incoming from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+ (although we rarely get any messages from the latter two). With Twitter, this includes active searches set up for stuff like "#NorthernRail" where they haven't directly @'d us in. The number of messages we get in varies a lot but at this time of year, with leaf-fall, short-forms, storms etc, we generally get 800-1200 messages a weekday. We hit 1400 on Monday, including 300 in one hour in the morning while the Doncaster-Sheffield line was down and Leeds was chaos because of a broken down VTEC train. Nearly all of them were complaints
As a few people here have alluded to, the complaints we get in can be incredibly vitriolic and arrogant. You have people who we can see portray themselves on Twitter as very sweet, nice people who are sending us full-blown tirades saying we're the worst train operator in the world, we run a third world service, we should all be fired and that we don't care. It actually makes me worry about what sort of society we have become that people who project themselves in that way could actually be suppressing that sort of anger and then unleashing it on social media. And I don't buy that they don't know there's someone on the other end reading it - I don't think it's malicious but it's not out of ignorance either. Maybe there's just a certain type of person who does that - it's hard to know how representative it is. It's definitely made me change the way I post on social media
As much as anything, a lot of the complaints do show up how little people understand how the railway works. But the frustrating aspect of that is even if you try and explain to them that, to give a topical example, there are no more carriages we can send out because we have a few in the depot for maintenance, they absolutely refuse to accept that as a valid reason and think we're fobbing them off, even though it's entirely true. They can't understand that it's going to take another year for us to develop our new trains, because as far as they're concerned it's been 18 months since the start of the franchise so why aren't they ready to go? We must be making it all up. Our customers don't trust us at all, and that seems to be entirely indicative of the industry as a whole and how people interact with nearly all TOC social media accounts
But there are other aspects to our job. We have to do a lot of fault-reporting, be it trains or stations. We have to chase up Delay Repay claims and complaints that the Customer Experience Centre haven't dealt with. We submit complaints that customers send us. We pass on positive feedback to colleagues (mostly conductors). We deal with unit number requests and our "regular tweeters", ranging from a few people who like a natter with us to autistic people who really like trains and think of us as friends - this has been one of the most surprising aspects to the job for me as I'd have had no idea this was such a big thing, but it's a nice distraction most of the time. And these days we have a brief to produce "creative content" every week - those of you who follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook will know we've been putting out a lot more casual posts around things like #GuessTheStation or station tours, which is there to encourage positive engagement, something the company is quite keen on (as all comms output has metrics attached to rate it)
This is of course on top of the main role we have, which is to respond to virtually every message we get in - it's not always possible, and we've had to ignore a lot more messages of late because the sheer number coming in is not something we can physically deal with. The first week I was in on full shift was the week where we were short-forming everything on the MCO-Hunts Cross line and it was an absolute nightmare - we were routinely getting 100-200 messages of abuse from the residents of Urmston and Irlam every peak, the same people every time. The two storms were pretty bad as well - train companies are now apparently supposed to prevent hurricanes, according to our customers, so it was all our fault that the Calder Valley got flooded. But I feel a lot more settled in the role now and this week has been a lot quieter
What I would say is that I'm quite rare in that I'm a rail enthusiast who wanted to get into the industry specifically. My colleagues on the team aren't rail specialists, although two have family members who are in the industry. The team members are there on social media expertise. It has its pros and cons. Perhaps someone with less enthusiasm for the industry and the company wouldn't take some of the criticism to heart as much as I do!
As much as anything, you don't need to be an expert in railways to do a TOC social media job - you just need to be given the right information, and intelligent people can work with that, regardless of whether or not they know the difference between a 150 and 156. The problem comes when the right people don't pass that information on, and we end up looking less informed than the customers who are messaging us. Often if a tricky question comes in that I don't have the information for, I'll just Google the answer myself. 9 times out of 10, that's enough to give the right answer
But there are exceptions. I was asked about opening hours at Buckshaw Parkway today - the closing time is down on the NRE website as 17:45, but it's actually 00:10 (I have that information because I put it together and sent it to NRE in September, and they still haven't updated it!). But I wouldn't have known that if I didn't have the spreadsheet I put together with that on - that information is not available internally or externally. You'll be surprised at how little information we are actually given to work with - a lot of the stuff we need to do our jobs just isn't available to us on demand, and we don't have the time to chase it up with colleagues, because we're expected to respond very quickly - people have been complaining a lot lately that we haven't been responding within about 10 minutes, because we're dealing with backlogs of 300-400 messages going back several hours
It's been a learning experience - I'll say that much. The industry doesn't communicate well internally, and it's us on the front line who have to face the abuse of customers when things go wrong and we don't have the answers to give to them. It's very hard not to care, because you have a lot of different stories coming in every day, some of them very emotionally charged, and it's hard not to sympathise - at the same time, it's very hard not to care for the company when customers are making totally ill-founded criticisms of us and then using that to go to the press or politicians, which they then use to justify their own positions. That's why I don't agree that those of us just sit there and don't give a toss or have to give a toss - it's impossible not to
And for all the fact that it's "only" communicating from behind a computer screen, people's behaviour is a lot more extreme when they don't have to face an individual. Since I started on this job, I go to sleep and dream of responding to angry customers. I appreciate I'm not a nurse, or a fireman, or a policeman, or even doing some of the less pleasant work on the railways - it's not traumatising. But it's not like we're sat there chatting with mates either - it's very serious, professional customer service work, for 9 hours a day, 7 days in a row