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Some commuters on the 32 bus should soon get some cool relief
By adamg on Mon, 08/09/2010 - 8:46am
At 8:30 this morning, Dave Vittorini tweeted to MBTA General Manager Richard Davey about conditions on the Hyde Park Avenue bus:
operator 70135 on the 32 bus NEVER has the ac on. It's sooo hot. I feel like I need another shower when I get to work.
Six minutes later, Davey replied:
we'll take care of that.
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Comments
It's amazing that there is
It's amazing that there is now a forum to get to high levels of management in complexly layered beauracracies, but it sucks that those of us that aren't vain enough to fart out the random trivia of our life on a hourly basis are left out. This spring I had a flight canceled due to weather, which I learned upon printing my boarding pass at the office and seeing that it was for a flight the next day connecting through a city 1200 miles away from the one I was supposed to go through. Confused, with a trip to south america hanging in the balance, I began to try and get information--from the web, email, phoning the call center, the headquarters, the airport[s]. No luck. I opened a twitter account, sent a message to the airline twitter center, and got a response in 5 minutes. 10 minutes later, someone from the company headquarters in Texas was calling me, staying late to resolve it for me.
Like I said, its incredible to get that level of response, but its silly that Twitter is the way we have to get it.
Popularity is a big factor
Popularity is a big factor there. Blame the masses.
Expand, not limit, options
I agree 100%. Back in my customer service managment days we developed a customer-facing website. Upper management wanted to know how much this would reduce my need for staffing in the call center. I stressed that my primary goal was intended to offer additional service options for our customers, not so I could lay people off, though it would mean that I wouldn't need to hire to continue to offer good service to our increasing customer base.
Unfortunately in this economy, customer service seems to be the first thing tossed out the window, evidenced by the increased inability to get a live human on the phone, added on fees for "unbundled services", and the like. Even Twitter-service is more about PR than actual customer service. Provide good, comprehensive and considerate customer service in the first place, and you won't have to spend so much time and effort on face-saving stunts.
not just customer
not just customer service.
It's business 101 now a days.
Cut costs, lay people off, and leave the problems to the next guy. By the time the shareholders get mad, there's only the new guy to hold accountable, and the other guy made cash.
Twitter is what you make of it.
Twitter is what you make of it. For good, evil or dull. Some folks vainly show off their day on it. Some dribble a stream of consciousness on it. Many folks try to be funny. Some succeed. Fire departments report alarms and other emergencies. Public services provide updates on outages and delays. Spammers use followbots to shill on a keyword and annoy everybody. Someone reported a perv on the T and he was quickly arrested. People incessantly update their whereabouts and win foursquare points or whatever. And you discovered a very direct form of communication with someone or some department who was able to solve your problem.
It ain't the second coming or anything, but Twitter can be incredibly useful in certain situations. And ultimately it's just a service, but it's the one that's got the buzz so a lot of people are watching it right now. Make good use of that before the buzz moves on to the Next Big Shiny Thing.
Probably not Davey
Actually, it probably wasn't Davey who replied-- the mbtaGM twitter page says tweets from him will have "-RAD". Still nice to see a fast response; it'd be interesting to see if conditions on that bus improve.