Yesterday London Midland Trains tweeted that they were proud to have retained the top spot on the @engagementindex on Twitter. I’ve posted previously about how London Midland Trains use Twitter and how they provided  real time customer support trying to cross London during a time of rail disruption.

This tweet got me intrigued, so I had to take a look, and it led me to the trains report on the Engagement Index Engagement Index website.

Here is the graphic which is clear and easy to understand. Basically it is the ratio of direct tweets to an organisation that they have responded to, and those they have ignored. London Midland scores very highly as it responds to a high number of the tweets sent directly to them. The contrast is the train company at the bottom end that received  79 direct tweets and ignored them all, Arriva Trains Wales, oh dear.

During March 2012 London Midland Trains received 1022 direct tweets; they responded to 767 and ignored 255. That might seem a high rate, but having seen the London Midland twitter stream when things are busy, there is a lot of traffic, and you could forgive them for not responding to some of the more ‘jaunty’ tweets (there is an interesting post on the Engagement Index blog about how to deal with tweets that contain swearing). The only other organisation that seems to come close to the London Midland performance (apart from Greater Anglia Trains) is Halifax in the banking report

What I like about the Engagement Index approach (apart from it being free) is the fact that it is beautifully straightforward. I can’t do any better than to quote straight from their website:

Overview

The Engagement Index is a score on how well or badly a business is replying to messages aimed at them. It is a measure of their customer service performance on Twitter. More and more consumers / customers are turning to social media and in particular Twitter to engage, ask, complain to brands and businesses. Engagement Index measures how well or badly those companies are at replying to those messages.

What’s the aim?

To develop a simple scoring system with the aim of raising the customer service bar particularly in the UK. Sadly customer care in the UK to my mind is in the most part still very poor. Twitter is a game changer for businesses. Through Engagement Index I want businesses to be able to track themselves so that they can see how they are performing, see if the resources they have allocated are sufficient and aimed in the right places and so on.

A couple of posts from John Dell’Armi give a good perspective on why organisations need to treat social media and particularly Twitter like any other form of customer feedback.  This one talks about having  nothing to fear (if you do the right thing) and another one about train companies of all things, “if you are on twitter, you need to be on twitter”.

So what’s the PONT?

1. Customer (service user) engagement on Twitter is just like any other form of engagement, so don’t ignore it.
2. The Engagement Index is a powerful tool for measuring engagement. It  also allows benchmarking between and across sectors, and its free!
3. Public services could a useful area for the Engagement Index to focus its attention next.

Picture Source:  http://www.engagementindex.co.uk/reports?sector=trains