Great Western Railway (GWR)

Humanity @ Scale:
Great Western Railway (GWR)
GWR #SocialFirst Story
GWR take customer service very seriously. The ethos of the
GWR Social Team is “Personalized service, whenever, wherever.”
Industry:
Transport
About GWR
Great Western Railway (GWR) is a British train operating company
owned by FirstGroup. It manages 208 stations and it’s trains call
at over 270 stations in the UK.
#Challenges
• Great Western Railway (GWR) wanted to implement the new
Facebook Messenger tool to communicate with their customers,
making the line of communication easier during the very busy
holiday season.
• To better serve the mature social customer, who now prefer
private conversations, rather than mass venting sessions on
Social, GWR wanted to offer a new format for meaningful
engagements to provide help and resolution.
Serving the Social Customer
1
#Solutions
Messenger Support
• Since launch of Messenger for GWR in December
2015 - the GWR team have seen some great success
on the channel.
• GWR have processed 6000 pieces of content through
Facebook since the launch of Messenger as a channel
for consumer.
• 85% of messages came through Messenger - a total of
4731 Messenger queries during December to March.
Mobile Responses in the moment
The team are great at responding in real time to commuters
using their service.
• Just before rush hour, response time sits at 2 minutes
between 4pm-5pm as commuters prepare to board their
trains home from work.
• During the peak rush hour of 5pm-6pm, that response time
decreases to 3 minutes showing that the GWR team have
been resolving conversations in real time on average, across
the 3 months as commuters are in the middle of their journey.
This real time conversation with commuters shows that the
GWR social team have complete autonomy in their responses,
as well as the ability to look up all the information they need in
real time to respond to a commuter as soon as their query
has come in.
Team Empowerment
!"#$%&#
“Our!"#$"#%&#'&$
aim is for Messenger
'(#)*+,-#.&"$!-,$
!/ -#
0/*#1
!2
2&
-- !,2"#!-#$%&#
to give
a
customer
a
first
3-!$&.#4$,$&"
response in 10 mins in
business hours and under
3 minutes in peak times.
We also aim to continue to
resolve in real-time over
Messenger and commit to
a resolution rate around
90% making Messenger a
primary channel in our
social strategy.”
56/*+&"7
How do you resource a team in peak times using a real time
channel such as Messenger? Messenger requires an
engaged team with all the information they need to respond
at their fingertips.
With a response time on average of under 5 minutes across
all GWR channels, it’s imperative that the team has been
trained in keeping a very human tone of voice, motivated to
help people, and have the ability to reply without
management approval.
It’s this flow of conversation that makes Messenger such a
successful channel for GWR.
™
Serving the Social Customer
2
Resolving Customer Issues in Messenger
Messenger’s functionality promotes a real time conversation
with you, the customer. This also means that the customer
chooses the channel, and expects a resolution in the
channel of their choosing.
The great news for GWR is that they meet this commuter
expectation. Their social team are trained to deliver resolution
in the moment of the customer’s choosing, which is especially
important for a commuter waiting for a train.
GWR’s team deliver an overall resolution rate of resolving a
commuter query in the Messenger channel of 84%.
There can be a variety of queries sent by a commuter, from
the train service to tickets queries and general chatter from
a commuter using the GWR service. The GWR team
originally implemented Messenger to speak to commuters
over the peak period of engineering works. Consumers are
now using this channel for so much more.
Customer Feedback - Messenger’s triumphant success
Results:
84%
Rate of resolution
Hey
Hey! What
seems to
be the issue?
√ seen
Where
is my train?
It’s late!
We’re
on it!
√ seen
Your train will
be there in
8 minutes! :)
√ seen
Here’s a sample of the consumer reaction...
Our personal favorite has to be this comment from one
GWR commuter, who found this human approach to her
Social Media query, an absolute commitment to Social
Customer Service.
I'm rather stunned actually - corporations and businesses
don't very often react to human problems in a human way,
so consider our relationship repaired. That is a lovely
gesture, thank you….And in the interests of fairness I will
spread news of your kindness if you don't object. I think it
is a genuinely wonderful thing to do and I wasn't expecting
a reply let alone this.
84% overall resolution rate of
resolving a commuter query in the
Messenger channel
The future of GWR + Messenger
“We will be ensuring that all our email call to actions that go
out to our customer database will have a Messenger button
at the bottom to come and speak to the team through that
channel. We’ve seen our customers comment that they get
a much faster response on Messenger than on email and
we aim to keep providing that level of customer service.
All new timetables have a call to action to speak to us on
Messenger, for any fare or ticket queries.
We are also ensuring that all train managers are equipped
with business cards on all stations, during busy peak times
or train delays to hand out to commuters to get in touch with
us on Messenger so we can resolve their query as they are
on the platform. “ Jess Smith, GWR
85%
85% of messages came through
Messenger out of all content sent
by GWR customers over Facebooka total of 5000 Messenger queries
during December to March.
Serving the Social Customer
3