Examining National Rail’s customer feedback programme
by Feedback Ferret on August 15, 2011 at 2:28 pm
By Billy Brooks
There will never be a shortage of UK rail travel customers willing to give their thoughts on how services could be improved. So, we were encouraged to see a tweet the other day from National Rail pointing its followers to a customer feedback form, run by the Passenger Information Strategy Group (PISG), asking followers to share their experiences.
After closer inspection, we felt there were a number of aspects of National Rail’s strategy that were worth sharing and highlighting:
1. Use of Twitter. Hit or miss?
National Rail’s use of Twitter is in itself interesting. Typically we recommend that brands ask customers for feedback as close to the interaction point as possible – for example, immediately after making a purchase in-store or a call to the contact centre or via a follow-up email after a holiday.
You might imagine therefore that National Rail would have been better served handing forms out at stations or putting adverts (or QR codes) on trains themselves (as I note TfL has done recently in London).
But the complexity of the UK’s railway infrastructure puts National Rail in a tricky situation, making it quite a challenge to roll out a nationwide feedback programme in train carriages. And this illustrates an important point…
Sometimes, companies just don’t have easy access to customers; while an airline will have contact details for every single passenger, a train operator won’t.
And so, in this respect, using social media could be seen as a masterstroke. The vast majority of National Rail’s Twitter followers have probably used a train service recently, making the social network a direct and timely feedback channel for this audience.
2. Too many questions
While the use of Twitter is great, the questionnaire itself is likely to put many passengers off as it is far too long.
The form stretches over several pages and asks a lot of quite detailed questions, which can be self-defeating; there is a lot of reading to do and plenty of clicking required. Paradoxically keeping forms short can actually increase the amount of feedback given, which leads us nicely onto the next point…
3. Yes or no questions
We’ve discussed before the importance of asking open-ended questions and how best to achieve this. By asking so many closed questions, National Rail is missing out on some really useful insights. The survey does have a space at the end for ‘further comments’ but it’s very small, which means passionate passengers will get cut off in mid flow by the limitations of the form. Not a great way to engage passengers or assuage travel frustrations.
In the past, the difficulty of analysing open-ended feedback presented an obstacle for many brands, but technology has moved on since then; Feedback Ferret’s contextual analysis engine for example puts no limit on either the length of text that can be analysed, or the number of topics it can extract from every sentence.
4. Sending the right signals
The survey is being run using the Survey Monkey tool which, because it is free, doesn’t give the impression that National Rail has invested much in this programme. While the structure of any feedback form is as important as the ‘look and feel’, showing customers that you are serious about investing in voice of the customer programmes is important.
5. On the right track?
So all in all, it is a good effort from National Rail. Twitter is a handy, cost-effective tool to gather feedback for companies that have large, engaged communities. It’s also a good option for businesses where getting customer data can be tricky.
The form itself however needs work. By making it shorter, but encouraging respondents to leave open-ended answers, National Rail could then use contextual analysis technology to mine this raw information for actionable insights to help it make improvements to the service and the experience of its customers.
By taking on board the points in this blog, National Rail should be able to get its customer feedback programme back on track!
