Brand on the tracks

Melbourne’s train operator Metro Trains was this week recognised as having the most dissatisfied rail customers in Australia – not a good result for any brand. The group has invested heavily in pushing communications to customers, but is still failing to communicate with customers using its service day-to-day. Here is a personal experience that led to some key lessons for Metro Trains management.

Dear Metro Trains,

In the beginning I was a supporter of you here in Victoria. “Give them a chance,” I pleaded on Twitter, “they need a bit of time to get things up and running and undo some of the issues created by the previous operators and they are dealing with bad infrastructure, it’s not their fault the equipment is bad…”

Well – time’s up!

All the proactive communications via television ads and web alerts in the world about delays, track works and line closures don’t matter one jot when your communications at the pointy end of the stick – aka when things go wrong – fail miserably.

Case in point. Traveling home by train last week I made the switch at Newport as I now have to do seeing as you decided that my part of the rail network doesn’t deserve direct services. Jumping on the train I settled in for the short trip to my station. About a minute in comes an announcement that we wouldn’t be going to my station after all but instead going direct to the end of the line because of a problem at one of the stations.

That was it. In effect you just told me you were going to dump me somewhere other than where I had expected to go and for all I knew after that I would be on my own.

From there things went from bad to worse. The end result? My usual 45 minute trip home from the city became an hour and 45 minutes. I had to laugh at the irony today when the Minister for Public Transport, Mr Mulder said in an article that: ”This means that Seaholme, Altona and Westona residents have more certainty with their trains.”

Once I get to the other end of the line the Metro staff at the station had NO idea what was going on, couldn’t tell us now long we’d have to wait or even what the problem was. And so as other services beset by same issue arrive, there was now a growing group of reasonably upset people milling around complaining to each other and generally trash talking you – some more vocally than others.

I have to say that if there is a more thankless job right now than being a frontline employee for you I am not sure I can think of it. Quite simply “central command” (a misnomer if ever there was one) had left them as much in the dark as we were, and for that alone you deserve my ire. The guys at the station wore the brunt of the traveling publics’ displeasure with remarkable calm and I cannot fault them for the way they tried to deal with a situation not of their making and out of their control.

So what could you have done differently?

1. Inform people BEFORE they get on the train that there is a problem with the line so they have the choice to stay where they are or not. Nothing upsets a customer more than feeling like a hostage in addition to being caught in a situation they have no control over.

2. Make sure that when the train gets to the other end, the people at that station are on the platform ready with up-to-date information about expected length or delay and other options such as where to catch local buses or taxis for people who didn’t want to wait. I would happily have jumped in cab had there been any around.

3. Give out free day pass tickets to every affected passenger who wanted them by way of apology and acknowledgement of the inconvenience. The appearance that you don’t care when these things happen or acknowledge they are a huge inconvenience are a big part of your public relations problems.

4. Learn from these situations and work to put processes in place so next time there is a problem with a train the above suggestions all happen. I know I am not alone in feeling like I am stuck in the movie Groundhog Day with you – it seems like the same issues keep happening over and over again with no end in sight.

In this circumstance your brand took a hit because of what you did and what you didn’t do. Some of what happened was quite probably out of your immediate control. What you did and didn’t do after that were choices you made and for that you lose any consideration from me. Time’s up.

Yours sincerely,

Delayed and disgruntled

See you next week.

Michel is an independent brand adviser and advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations make promises they can keep and keep the promises they make, with a strong sustainable brand as the result. She also publishes the brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment. You can follow Michel on Twitter @michelhogan