Problem Management through Social Media

If you follow me via my blog or Twitter (@readyforthenet) you likely would have seen a flurry of tweets and posts around a failure event last week involving the Long Island Railroad (LIRR). Sure it was a bit frustrating for many people, including me; however it evolved into a case study in the use of Social Media to manage through consumer issues.

Tom Golway

Now we are not talking about your average consumer, we are talking about some of the most demanding commuters in the country, commuters who pay substantial ticket fares to travel to very demanding jobs and receive a sub-optimal service.

The LIRR historically has its share of service outages, but what has caused the most pain for their customers has been their lack of clear communications during an outage. The LIRR has tried; they put an e-mail alerting system in place. When it works it is ok; however e-mail alerting is unreliable, not scalable and lacks persistency. Typical complaints are not receiving the alert, receiving the alert long after the event occurred or missing the e-mail in the normal sea of e-mails received daily.

Commuting and Social Media

Today at 7PM I received an alert from the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) about an issue that happened that would impact tomorrow’s morning commuter train commute. They said look for updates before heading for work.

Tom Golway

This is not a first and brings up the question ‘Why are they always so reactive with so little process?’ Issues occur that can't be predicted in advance, but flexible response processes can be developed to limit the impact of an issue. This would be an ideal time for them to be proactive and implement a pre-planned reduced schedule. Then leverage social media to get the word out to as many people as possible.

While looking at their social media presence, I found out that they do not monitor their social media 24x7. Do they think that nothing is reported via social media? Or perhaps events, issues or any other news never happens outside of their 9-5 M-F monitoring window.