Why do train operators not give the passengers a way to report problems in real time?

You don’t need have a daily train journey like me to notice the significant number of  broadband enabled laptops, iPhones, Blackberry and other smarts phones that are used by the passengers. I frequently wonder why South West Trains and other train operators doesn’t use this presence of communication devices to set-up a simple system where cleanliness and other problems can be reported in real time so teams can addressed the problem before the next scheduled cleaning/repair check.

Calling it a phone doesn’t mean you are having a conversation

South West Trains (SWT) is running something they call Live Web Chat every 6 months this is apparently done because they believe in listening to the views and opinions of their customers. However, it seems like they just picked the name of a technology and pretend it is used to listen to the customers, but this isn’t the case and even wrongly labelled:

• It is not ‘Live’, questions can be submitted on a form and they may be answered, certainly not real (live) time.
• It is not ‘chat’ but a simple ask a question, chat is about conversation, not about asking a question.

• It is not ‘listing’ to answer a question and reading the answers doesn’t give the impression South West Trains want to listen – they answer a question by explaining the reason behind an issue  instead of listen to the root issue and find a way to address it. There is no possibility to follow-up with a second question.
• It is not enough to run a session every 6 monthly is a world where instant / real time is the dominating trend.

Technology can certainly help South West Trains if they were truly interested in having a dialogue with customers, they could for a start get involved in the lively dialogues on twitter, I can’t find a single tweet (reply) from South West Train to any of the many negative tweets about South West Trains.

There is a  Facebook group called “South West Trains SUCK”, I doubt it is a group created by South West Trains and I can’t find a South West Trains official group, so SWT is again missing an opportunity to get feedback from their customers and should immediately get a presence on Facebook if they serious about listing to their customers.

Technology can make it possible to listen to customers in a complete new way, but it doesn’t matter if the mind-set in the organisation is about listen to customers and not talk to them.

PS: Why do SWT not give a way to report problems live / instant / real time, like the fact the floor on this train is very dirty, somebody dropped a big cup of orange juice – there are plenty of internet connected laptops and iPhone on the trains so it could easy be reported.

Rough applications or useful tools ?

Most corporate IT departments are trying to ensure only a small approved set of application is used. I have even see a company that runs a big internet site, trying to ban 500+ engineers from downloading free stuff from the internet, was pretty funny and show how out of touch some IT departments are with the need of the users.

An alternative approach would be to understand the reasons behind the popularity of these “rogue” applications. Needs drive demand. Organisation work hard on understanding the needs of their customers, why not try to understand the IT needs of the internal users.

Imagine a day you start a new job and you get a laptop loaded with useful tools and bookmarks to on-line serviced used, it would be a big step from the common practice of a standard set of Microsoft Office suite programmes.

Freedom to surf makes staff more productive

A research project from The University of Melbourne shows “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says.

This raises the question why some IT departments are busy with blocking sites that may actually increase the productiveness.