All aboard the apology express
Andrew Couch spends much of his work day apologizing, usually on Twitter, and this turns out to be more complicated than it sounds. Simply typing “I’m sorry” over and over again won’t do.
“You can’t repeat yourself,” said Couch, part of the social media team for the Great Western Railway, one of the United Kingdom’s largest train companies. “Sometimes you say, ‘I’m sorry we’ve done this.’ Or ‘Apologies for this.’ Or ‘I’m sorry that this happened.’ You’ve got to understand the situation and you need to mix it up.”
This is the Age of Sorry for nearly every train company in Britain.
In May, National Rail, which owns the country’s entire rail infrastructure, unveiled its twice-a-year revision to daily time tables. Because of new connections and services, there were about 4 million changes, about seven times the usual number. The result was a shambles. Naturally, National Rail later apologized. Train companies such as Great Western, which are granted franchise rights to run different lines, are still coping with the aftermath, made worse by a continuing and tricky upgrade to larger and spiffier trains.
There have been tens of thousands of delays and cancellations, enraging just as many passengers. The anger, in turn, has prodded train companies to a seemingly endless cascade of apologies.
A running total of online train company regrets is available on a website Sorryfortheinconvenience.co.uk, created by Omid Kashan, a fed-up commuter and web designer. It tallies up apologies from the Twitter accounts of 25 British rail companies. All together, they have tweeted “sorry” more than 417,000 times since the start of the year.
Great Western is the one of the sorriest train lines of them all.
Its six-member social media team is split between Plymouth and the company’s headquarters in Swindon, a town that has been synonymous with trains since the early 19th century.
The Great Western team has issued 30,000 apologies since the start of the year, an average of 110 per day. (Only one company, the Northern, apologizes more.) Customers pepper the Great Western Twitter feed, @GWRHelp, about 1,000 times every 24 hours.
“Missing my London connection again!” wrote Holly Rush not too long ago. “Well done u bunch of idiots.”
Many add withering hash tags, like# when will welearn ,# rip off service and# this is not good enough.
Through it all, the social media staff patiently offers guidance, explanations — and apologies. A name is attached to each Great Western response, just one way the team tries to convey sincerity.
“When you type, it’s difficult to make it sound like you’re not being patronizing or sarcastic,” said Joanna Linzinger, who manages the team. “So we have to try really hard to make our sorries sound like they’re coming from a warm person rather than a keyboard.”