Snow has been here again, reminding me on my last trip to Paris, for XMAS, on Eurostar.

So to start this year’s blog, I thought that I would look back on my Eurostar experience over the Xmas period as I was trying to go to Paris to spend holidays with my French family.

Soon after five trains had broken down in the tunnel on December 19th, Eurostar started to send email updates every day, asking their customers to check the Eurostar website every evening at 8pm for traffic information.

Are emails good enough to communicate in a crisis period?

After having said that traffic would resume normally on the Tuesday, Eurostar updated us on Monday 21st to say that trains running on Tuesday will only take on board passengers who were due to travel on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. At this stage, I was seriously starting to doubt my chances of joining in the traditional family gatherings.

Then an email came through on Tuesday evening informing me that trains departing on Wednesday will only be for people normally meant to travel on Tuesday. It meant I’d only be able to travel on Xmas eve…Joy. I could now say goodbye to my planned day of Xmas shopping in Paris!

Wednesday arrived, the day that I was originally meant to travel. In the morning, I checked my emails again, but no further news. I felt I could not be satisfied with a “come and try tomorrow” answer knowing that the previous information had proved every day changing.

 Customer care department, here I come.

I then decided to call Eurostar customer care department, which responded quickly. There I was told by a young customer care attendant that Eurostar had resolved the customers backlog the day before, and that if I turned up after 1pm, there was a good chance I could travel that day. However when I asked how good the chance was, she apologetically said she could not say more. Brighton is about 70 miles from London by train, so taking the gamble concerned me. 

Would twitter be able to help?

I went on twitter to find out what was really going on at St Pancras International. Using #Eurostar I found tweets from people worried like me, but I was looking for people who would be in the station and able to give me the freshest information. Three people answered, all telling me how chaotic things were. But I could not find tweets from Eurostar itself. Nobody seemed to be on twitter there. I went on to the Eurostar website to look for a twitter ID, but could not find any. And no twitter ID had been mentioned in their emails obviously.

Not knowing much, I decided to take the gamble and headed for St Pancras. There I queued for an hour and a half, and got on a train that was nearly half empty! I must say in the station things were very well organised. Too bad however for those who had abided by Eurostar emails information and not dared turning up at the station.

All this got me thinking to how Eurostar handled communication with their customers in such exceptional circumstances. Could they have done things better?

I can think at least of two things.

 A better use of micro-blogging

Since my adventures I found out that Eurostar has two twitter profiles.

@Eurostar1912 which was created just after the tunnel incident. However tweets from this profile stopped on December 21st.

@little_break which is labelled as “the official Eurostar twitterfeed” and which apparently was originally used by the marketing department, not for customer service. This profile had gone quiet after December 27th, once the dust of the crisis had settled, although followers (1145) kept asking questions with regards to customer service issues. Because of the new freeze, tweet updates are being posted again from this profile.

Surely, Eurostar should have a permanent twitter profile specifically geared towards their customer service, and preferably a profile with a Eurostar related name to make it easy to find (as opposed to little_break). Also, would not it make sense to use well-thought hash tags to facilitate new people joining in the conversation? Their twitter IDs should also be easily found on their website and added in their email communications.

 What about Good old SMS?

Not all Eurostar customers are users of twitter. Not everyone has a smart phone with internet access. So at least for now, Twitter alone cannot be the answer. Why don’t Eurostar ask in their booking process for a mandatory mobile telephone number? This could easily be used for instant alerts on train disruptions, delays, or availability of additional trains.

As choice matters to customers, it could also be a good idea to ask which one of these communications channels is to be used in priority for receiving emergency information.

No doubt this would translate into costs. More people would be needed to drive and monitor conversations on twitter. Eurostar being an Anglo-French venture they’d also need bi-lingual people to do this. The booking process would need to be reviewed and the CRM behind it as well; whilst the SMS broadcasting system added to the whole system.

But think of the gains!

By reviewing their customer service delivery and adopting an integrated approach to the different communications channels they would improve their customers’ experience. And make their staff’s work easier. The prospect of fewer empty seats on last minute added trains, fewer people rushing to an already crammed station, fewer calls flooding the switchboard and greater positive word of mouth marketing surely should pay off for the investment.

Posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 2:23 pm in Email Marketing, Twitter related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.