Southeastern are holding a second “Tweet the Manager” session tomorrow. We welcome this, and we hope that they have learned from the first session held a month ago. We have done some analysis of what happened in January, and we are making some specific suggestions for improvement.

Southeastern have for a number of years held periodic “Meet The Manager” sessions at London terminals from 0800-1000. These give commuters the opportunity to ask questions directly to one of a number of Southeastern’s managers taking part. It’s sometimes difficult for commuters to linger on the way to work, but if customers have a few minutes then they can be useful – and it is a good gesture by Southeastern.

Last autumn Southeastern held a number of “Meet the Manager” sessions focused on the London Bridge rebuilding at major “home” railway stations. These were very welcome in principle – people should have more time to linger in the evening.  However because these were between 1600 and 1800 they finished before many commuters arrived – even if their trains were on time. We hope that these sessions will be continued at some time this year, but perhaps at a slightly later time – particularly at Kent stations.

A further innovation was a “Tweet The Manager” session on Thursday 8 January at 1400 to 1600. Southeastern invited questions through Twitter, and promised that managers would address them.

There was a reasonable amount of engagement, especially given the novelty of the event and the time of day. After discounting questions that seem rhetorical, and also the inevitable but small amount of abuse, we counted 147 questions from 52 people. Southeastern made 82 responses  and addressed at least one question from at least 38 of the participants.

Southeastern are running another “Tweet the Manager” tomorrow, Monday 9 February, again between 1400 and 1600. We’d suggest a number of areas where they could easily make it better than the first:

1. Name the Managers

At the physical “Meet the Managers” sessions at stations the managers have name badges, and can give out business cards. For the first Tweet the Manager the policy seems to have been to keep them anonymous.

@SevenoaksRailTA You have managers from all areas of the business affected by Thameslink / London Bridge.David is keeping a close eye #TTMSE

— Southeastern (@Se_Railway) January 8, 2015

We consider that Southeastern should at least name the managers taking part, and publish a photograph of them at work. They could also attribute specific replies using the “^JT” convention which the Southeastern Twitter team often use themselves. This would help dispel any suspicion that there are no managers actually there and all the responses are coming from one over-worked PR person.

2. Make sure that everyone gets an answer

We do not understand why some people did not get any answer to what seemed to us reasonable questions. Everyone who asks reasonable questions politely should get a response.

3. Make sure that every question is answered

If this cannot be done in the allotted two hours, do so quickly later the same afternoon.

4. Engage!

“Meet the Manager” sessions are supposed to be about discussion, not just factual questions. That means engaging in the response to the response.

5. Don’t hand off general points to the contact centre or other channels

While individual cases or complaints may be best pursued through the Southeastern contact centre, general issues are best answered within the Tweet The Manager in order that others can participate and comment.

6. For the future, consider a different time of day

Many of Southeastern’s customers will be hard at work between 1400 and 1600, and many bosses will not be sympathetic to use of social media at that time. Southeastern should consider running the next one in the late afternoon/early evening: the evidence shows that many people tweet about Southeastern when they are on a train.

Let us know how you would like these sessions to be improved by using the comment box below – or by contacting us on Twitter on @SevenoaksRailTA!

Update: We’ve done a report-back on the Tweet the Manager. We were pleased to see that many of these suggestions were taken on board by Southeastern. We also conducted a short survey of participants who suggested better times of day could be 1600-1900 during the commute home or 1200-1400 during lunch.