The Orange and Silver lines undergo track work June 4 along I-66 in Falls Church, Va. (J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post)
As Metro’s SafeTrack maintenance blitz enters its second phase, the transit agency is gearing up to launch a new social-media strategy resembling that of airlines — with two-way dialogue and staff dedicated to fielding customer complaints.
The transit agency has hired four staffers with experience in social-media-oriented customer service, an undertaking the agency hopes to launch by Labor Day. The employees, who began last week, come from a regional utility company, a national retail chain, a local health-care provider and a contact center for businesses.
[SafeTrack closures: These D.C. Metro lines and stations will be disrupted in the next year]
“This is coming online at a good time, as customers are seeking more information about SafeTrack and how surges will impact their commutes,” Metro spokeswoman Sherri Ly said. “Social customer care gives us another way to reach riders with information in real time.”
Metro customers have been vocal in their complaints about the agency’s interaction with riders and what many describe as its failure to communicate with the public and provide them with real-time information via social media.
[Here’s what to expect with Surge No. 2]
And this isn’t the first social media revamp Metro has attempted to coincide with a major rebuilding program. When the agency launched Metro Forward in 2011, a public-relations campaign to promote a $5 billion, six-year program to rehabilitate the aging system, it embarked on an aggressive effort to spread the word via social media. It launched a Twitter account, @MetroForward, aimed at sharing progress reports on the repairs.
Lynn Bowersox, then-managing director of public relations, said at the time the agency was “building a communications infrastructure” that will enable it to be more active on social-media outlets and have a “two-way dialogue with customers.”
Many riders have characterized the effort as a failure.
[Metro launches aggressive social media effort]
The second SafeTrack surge, a shutdown of the Blue, Orange and Silver Lines from the Eastern Market to Benning Road and Minnesota Avenue stations, began Saturday, cutting off service to the District for tens of thousands in Maryland and Virginia. SafeTrack has 15 projects and is slated to end in mid-March.
The track work is sure to result in commuter headaches and occasional outrage for a ridership that isn’t shy about venting — about long waits, busted escalators and sauna-like railcars — to longtime Web observers such as @unsuckdcmetro and @FixWMATA, and using the popular Twitter hashtag #wmata.
Metro has been criticized in the past for its opaqueness over social media, particularly when communicating the nature of emergencies. When a Red Line train stalled in a smoky tunnel near Friendship Heights in April, some riders received their first concrete details about the incident from an amateur account, @RailTransitOPS, rather than Metro employees or official channels.
[On Metro, rail enthusiasts fill communications void for riders]
Under the new initiative, Metro says, riders will be able to connect with the agency’s customer service representatives more easily through text messages, social media and online chat — and also have the ability to quickly send pictures and videos of problems to staff. After a short testing period, the agency aims to begin offering social customer service later this summer.
Other transit agencies have tried their hand at social customer care. The Philadelphia subway’s @SEPTA_SOCIAL Twitter account, dedicated solely to customer service, is popular with riders, with a following of more than 16,000; staffers engage in a dialogue with riders throughout the day, with signed replies indicating which staffer saw the comment or complaint, a measure of accountability.
Metro’s current setup is optimized for information sharing, according to officials, not customer service. Among its @wmata, @metrorailinfo and @metrobusinfo Twitter accounts — which push out service alerts, news releases and other information — the agency has amassed more than 200,000 Twitter followers. It engages with customers, but replies are sporadic and unsigned.
“As they see customers on social media who have questions about the service — ‘I have to navigate around this detour, this route, or I just got to this station and found this disruption; what do I do?’ — those folks will be . . . monitoring social media and able to intercept riders’ questions and assist them,” said Bowersox, Metro’s assistant general manager for customer service. “This is a new job description at WMATA.”
One limitation of the new program: The employees staffing the program will work out of a call center from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., not all of the hours when the system is open. And Twitter, the platform so many use to gripe and call attention to problems on the system, figures only partly into the new strategy; a recent customer service survey showed only 16 percent of participating riders would use Metro’s Twitter accounts to keep abreast of SafeTrack service changes.
“But this is a Twitter town, to be sure,” Bowersox said.
Ly said Metro has been working for 18 months to introduce social customer care to its Hyattsville, Md., customer-care facility, where more than 50 employees give real-time information to about 3,500 customers by phone and email on a typical weekday.
Exactly how many of the staffers are dedicated to social media is less clear. Pressed about the number at a recent meeting of the agency’s Riders’ Advisory Council, Bowersox said “one at a time” — meaning one call center staffer was watching all of the agency’s social activity at a given time, something she pledged would change with the call center revamp.
Metro did not immediately respond to a request for more details about the past work experience of the new social-media employees or how the new initiative would differ from its current social-media practices.
“We will be in a position to answer your questions in greater detail at a later date,” Ly said in an email.