How not to use twitter as a public relations tool

In which I whinge a bit in that reserved English way.

(I'm posting this from my phone so don't expect fancy formatting and please excuse any spelling mistakes).

As you may have guessed this is going to be a bit of a moan, so if your plans for the day don't include reading complaints about train companies now would be the perfect time to stop reading.

In my last post I briefly mentioned that the cross country train that I was on on Friday was somewhat overcrowded.  Actually that's a massive understatement, it was like being forced to play sardines with a bunch of strangers. I mean it was literally so bad that you couldn't get to the toilet (but that didn't matter much since the loo was out of order anyway, as usual).

So I decided to look up cross country trains on twitter. (If you're not familiar with twitter, it basically lets you write short messages a bit like facebook status updates but limited to 140 characters, and it's surprisingly addictive).

I managed to find them at @crosscountryuk, and sent the following 2 messages:

"@crosscountryuk who does the seat provisioning on your bournemouth-manchester service? 7 weeks, 1 seay, tonight 15 people between carriages"

"@crosscountryuk I've only been able to reserve a seat once and apparently you're completely unaware that this week most schools went back."

(The @crosscountryuk bit is a bit like an email address but more public - other people can see the message too, but it's specifically aimed at them).

Ok, a bit whiney I'll admit but bear in mind at this point I'd been standing up for about 1.5 hours and was apparently breathing other peoples' sweat.

This was their response:

"Hi Chris. Always best to reserve a seat as our trains are very popular. We're working to make our reservation systems more reliable"
--http://www.twitter.com/crosscountryuk/status/24272199910

Well I assume it was a response to me - there's no @ name so it could be to some other Chris, but let's make the assumption for now and examine the content, ("let's unpack that", as the fairy godmother in Shrek 2 might say) shall we?

My gripe was 1) I can't get a seat on this train,ever and 2) I can't reserve a seat on this train, ever.  Their response was, basically, "try reserving a seat". Er, what? 

All I really wanted was an apology and maybe an indication that they'd look into why some of their trains are basically giant sardine cans at certain times. What I emphatically did not want or need was a response that said "try to do the thing that you've just told us you can't do".

I do understand that judging the right number if seats must be tricky (unless, perhaps you had data that told you how many people travelled each day and stuff, but where would you find a machine that could let you store and query so much data? Such a thing is beyond the ken of mortal men!), and there are technical issues like the length of platforms etc. to take into consideration. And that's fine, but if those are issues then tell me so, don't just try to suggest that the solution is to do something which has so far proved impossible.

To be frank if I hadn't seen the twitter response I probably wouldn't be posting this - the moral of the story being don't bother to respond to complaints if you're not going to read them properly anyway.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the service they provide I have no choice but to carry on using them. If any other service provider treated me like this I'd be off like a shot, but all I can do is moan about them; since I have to keep giving then my money anyway I doubt they care much.

So there we are. Such is my complaint, and having bleated it out I shall bid you goodnight.

I shall finish, however, on a positive note. On one of the journeys on the very train about which I am complaining, we were delayed slightly at birmingham new street. The guard declared over the tannoy, "we apologise for this slight delay. This was caused by incompetence." Nice to know there are some honest people working for them, at any rate.