Sally Ralston

Said the following about Marketing and Customer Relations team:

“Merseyrail – Wirral Loop Line Track Renewal

The Marketing and Customer Relations teams at Merseyrail have worked in a new and exciting way in delivering this clearly planned campaign and its targets. We hope the evidence provided demonstrates that that the marketing and customer relations teams here worked really well together ensuring positive results for our customers. We think that we have demonstrated that this creative campaign engaged both the customer and the internal team as demonstrated by the results set out below.

Ultimately the Wirral Loop Line Track Renewal was a successful campaign, delivered through the right channels with positive outcomes for our customers. This nomination is a collaborative approach involving several members of the customer relation, social media and marketing teams. Their experience covers a vast number of years and knowledge of the area and the business.

The Challenge:

This year saw a significant challenge to us as a business, as the concrete in the rail tunnels under the river Mersey or Wirral line ‘loop’ as we call it required replacing. Originally laid in the 1970s, the concrete the track sits on and the rails themselves needed to be replaced as part of a six month programme which involved a team working 40 metres underground, round the clock for the equivalent of 90,000 working hours between January-June 2017.

As a result, parts of the railway operation would be closed for large chunks of time during the 6 month window, being replaced by rail replacement busses. Effectively this prevented customers from Wirral from reaching Liverpool City Centre by rail for significant amounts of time. This was particularly the case during weekends and during the first and last 4 weeks of the works. Customers faced journey time increases on average of around 30 minutes compared to normal.

The challenges for Merseyrail as a business were clear;

• Significant disruption to customers for a 6 month period, with the Merseyrail network one of only three ways of crossing the River Mersey between Wirral and Liverpool. The only other options being the Mersey road tunnels and the Mersey Ferries. The Merseyrail network carries 44 million passenger journeys per year with a significant number of these journeys affected.

• A need for us to play our role in keeping the Liverpool City Region moving to avoid the wider transport network becoming gridlocked through people jumping in their cars.

• New concrete is not that exciting! Passengers won’t notice any significant difference to their journeys once the maintenance work is complete, making the ‘sell in’ a challenge.

• Ensuring we secured support and confidence in the mitigation of key Liverpool City Region stakeholders, such as business and tourism leaders.

It was clear from the outset, due to the scale of these challenges that Merseyrail’s marketing and customer service teams were going to have to working closely together as well as with other key stakeholders to make this a success.

Overall Approach to the project:

Working as part of a bespoke Liverpool City Region (LCR) approach to disruption, we formed a collaborative partnership between Network Rail, Merseytravel and Merseyrail. It ensured an operational and associated communications/marketing strategy with ‘one industry voice’ that balanced the need to get essential and complex work done with the need to keep people moving and the LCR ‘open for business’.

Key Partners in this endeavour;

• Network Rail – infrastructure owners and those carrying out the work via contractors

• Merseyrail – rail operator, leading the transport plan for customers.

• Merseytravel – the local transport body, with a transport co-ordination and oversight role to manage impacts on the whole transport network as well as considering the assets it owns/manages (Mersey Ferries, Mersey Tunnels) as part of the transport solution.

 

The Key Campaign Messages

There were a number of key messages that had to be communicated to passengers in advance to the work starting, and during the project:

• The main message was that Wirral loop line track renewal would run for a six month period, affecting all train services between Wirral and Liverpool.

• It was important that passengers understood that there were three phases to the works and that each would impact differently on their journey.

• Ensuring passengers could easily access alternative transport information and understood how their journey would be delayed was key in protecting experience.

• As passengers would see no visible improvements, it was important they understood that the work was safety critical and would ensure long-term safety and reliability.

• To ensure key arterial routes didn’t become severely congested, a key message was that passengers should use rail replacement buses or other public transport, as roads would not cope with a significant increase in car journeys.

What Merseyrail Marketing and Customer Services teams set out to achieve;

Form a Merseyrail perspective we approached the campaign with four key targets for success;

1. Ensure that our customers knew about the works in advance of them taking place, allowing them to plan ahead and make smart decisions. Our target was that the majority of our customers affected would be aware.

2. Ensure an overall positive sentiment was maintained within our social media customer base (42,000) followers throughout the works through the provision of good information, and responsiveness.

3. Ensure complaints volume levels did not increase as a result of the works.

4. Ensure that customer satisfaction (as measured by the National Rail Passenger Survey, conducted during the works) did not significantly reduce (e.g. below 91%).

The Campaign – What we did…

• Our marketing team worked hard with our partners to develop a communications and customer service strategy involving all key stakeholders with key targets. Due to the volume of people affected we decided early that digital channels supported by station based physical marketing would be the most effective in terms of reach.

• Involved a wide range of stakeholders early, seven months before the work to get their understanding and suggestions. This included a Parliamentary briefing, 40 individual and group briefings for local influencers and six monthly forums as well as special interest group forums such as cyclists and those with accessibility needs.

• Early and continuous communications and eye-catching marketing to raise awareness and understanding amongst stakeholders and customers, with bespoke media briefings three months in advance of the works, digital content, social media push messaging and physical marketing at key sites around the city region.

• A programme of passenger rewards or giveaways from Merseyrail including hand warmers, bacon sandwiches, ice cream and sweets was developed for delivery across the 6 months, to acknowledge the disruption passengers were experiencing.

• Our customer relations team worked closely with the marketing team and all stakeholders to ensure the messaging developed reached our customers. This included the establishment of a new social media real time information team to push information to customers through the live page on our website and through our twitter service.

• This was drawn together by the use of the #trackrenewal hashtag on twitter, the live webpage, and all printed marketing materials. Marketing activity was actively steering customers towards the most up to date information about the works both in advance and during to help keep the city region moving.

• The development of dynamic FAQ’s on our web and social media. These were developed in advance of the works in a collaboration between marketing and customer relations colleagues. As the works started to approach and customer questions began being received the two teams worked seamlessly to ensure that the most asked were added to the digital FAQ’s. This helped to both reduce customer complaints/contact but also in being able to quickly refer customers to accurate, easy to action information once they did contact us.

Outcomes

The collaborative work between the customer relations and marketing teams, together with our external partners, meant that they played a large part in the success of the Wirral Loop Line Track renewal project. We have measured this success against the targets set out for the project as detailed below;

Target - Ensure that the majority of our customers knew about the works in advance of them taking place, allowing them to plan ahead and make smart decisions.

Result

In the run up to the campaign we were very keen to measure the impact the campaign activity was having in terms of awareness and intended travel behaviour.

As part of this, two key passenger studies were done with customers. One was carried out independently by the passenger watchdog Transport Focus (immediately before the works) in December 2016. The other was carried out 3 months into the works in March 2017 by Merseytravel in its role as the local transport authority.

The results showed excellent levels of engagement from customers in the campaign;

• 84% of customers being aware of the works in advance. This compared extremely well with similar periods of disruption in other areas such as the Bath Spa works in 2015 where pre-survey activity showed only a 67% awareness.

• Pleasingly for the teams, 80% of customers felt that they had enough information to make informed choices about their journey; and

• 66% of customers surveyed had planned ahead and altered their journey pattern – a key element of the campaign.

Target - Ensure an overall positive sentiment is maintained within our social media customer base throughout the works;

Result

Using online monitoring software we were able to closely monitor the sentiment of passenger’s queries and comments about the work on social media. In total, 84.9% of mentions were positive or neutral, with neutral being requests for specific timetable information for example. Trends in social media mentions included praise for journey times being quicker than expected, for the friendly and helpful staff, bike bus, and for the free treats given out at stations.

Target - Ensure complaints volume levels did not increase as a result of the works

Result

There was no increase in complaint volumes through digital or conventional customer relations channels during the Wirral Loop Line Track Renewal. Complaint volumes actually fell during the works from an average of just under 30 per day to 20 per day by the end of the works (see graph below).

Feedback from customers leads us to believe that there were three main reasons behind this;

• The quality of information provided to customers in advance of the works.

• The amount of staff on the ground able to resolve customer issues/queries in moment.

• The quality of the real time information provided through our web site live page and social media channels to customers whilst travelling and the ability to resolve issues in moment.

Target: Ensure that customer satisfaction (as measured by the National Rail Passenger Survey, conducted during the works) did not significantly reduce (e.g. below 91%).

Result

The results were published in July 2017 and showed that despite the disruption Merseyrail had maintained industry leading standards of customer satisfaction with 94% of customer surveyed by the independent passenger organisations Transport Focus reporting satisfaction with the service offered.

Most pleasingly when asked about how the company dealt with delays, 15% more customer responded positively than in the previous survey. We fell this demonstrates how effectively the new approach had worked.

Conclusion

The Marketing and Customer Relations teams at Merseyrail have worked in a new and exciting way in delivering this clearly planned campaign and its targets. We hope the evidence provided above demonstrates that that the marketing and customer relations teams worked really well together ensuring positive results for our customers.“