Which transport company has the fastest customer service response time on Twitter?

In January we tested some of the nation’s leading retailers to see how fast they were at responding to customer service issues on Twitter. This time round, we’ve decided to focus on a new sector that regularly receives huge amounts of complaints (online and offline) and is well known for often having poor customer service - the transport industry.

For this test we asked 13 of the UKs most well known transport providers (covering buses, trains, flights and ferries) a fake customer service issue and recorded how long it took them to reply to our responses. As the results below show, some were incredibly quick and clearly understand the benefits/perils of Social Media. However, it was also clear that some companies either simply ignore complaints or simply restricted their Twitter channel to mass broadcast messaging of deals and notices.

The transport industry is always going to be blighted by delays, whether that’s from bad weather, broken vehicles or even a rare act of God such as the 2010 volcanic ash cloud disruption showed. With this in mind, transport companies definitely need to take notice and plan for Social Media, particularly as 1 in 2 consumers expect their complaints on Twitter to be responded to or read.

Buses

We spoke to 4 bus operators in the UK, largely asking about where to buy season tickets and whether they had WiFi on the bus (which surprisingly some Arriva Yorkshire buses do!). Megabus were the last company we tweeted to and they got back to us in a very quick 4 minutes. Arriva Yorkshire were also very helpful informing us of the new WiFi enabled buses launching soon. First buses in Yorkshire were the only provider to stay silent.

Trains

We picked 3 of the main route providers here in Yorkshire to test how quickly they would respond to our tweet about how much WiFi costs on board. Richard Branson’s Virgin were by far the fastest, responding in just over a quarter of an hour, whilst East Coast were just under an hour slower. Cross Country however failed to reply to our tweet and continue to pump out 1 way broadcast messages. Their Twitter bio reads “Although we don’t directly reply to passenger issues on Twitter our Customer Relations team are happy to help” followed by a link to their site and a telephone number. This is a prime example of company being on Social for no other reason than to sell and promote their own marketing collateral.

Flights

With flight tickets probably costing the most out of any of the modes of transports, you would expect that there would be better Social Media teams in place than say bus operators. However, our testing of some of the UKs largest airline operators suggests that there’s some very poor social media strategies (if any at all) in place. Both BMI and British Airways, giant brands, failed to respond to our tweets. Budget airline EasyJet however got back to us in a crisp 24 minutes.

Ferries

The final industry we spoke to was one that perhaps not many traditionally think about anymore with the cost of flights decreasing in the past two decades. Ferry operators are still multi-million pound businesses and offer transport connections across the Channel, Irish and North Sea from the likes of Liverpool, Dover and Hull. We tweeted two of the largest sea crossing operators P&O and Stena Line with customer service issues of a negative nature. P&O chose to ignore the complaint, instead their Twitter feed focused on special offers and brand news. Stena Line however were the fastest of any of the transport operators - responding to us in just under a minute in a polite, friendly and informative manner.