Not all companies get everything right all of the time. Everyone makes mistakes. However, in today’s world of the Internet and the growth of social media, when a company does get it wrong, dissatisfied customers can tell everyone about it quickly. News and opinion are distributed at an alarmingly quick pace through the Internet. Mainstream News sites are constantly updating their pages to unleash ‘Breaking News’ to the public while Twitter is a platform where opinion can be expressed instantly.
Therefore unhappy customers now have a mighty weapon in the Internet. If done right, they can air their grievances to anyone with an Internet connection, and the results could permanently scar a company’s online reputation.
A prime example of a company suffering a negative brand presence online currently is Eurostar. The cross Channel train provider faced though criticism towards the end of 2009 when it halted its services and a number of trains were stranded in the Channel Tunnel. Eurostar claimed this was down to severe weather conditions, but their explanation did little to appease angry travellers and 24 hour journalists taking to the Internet to express their views.
Mentions of Eurostar are consistent over a three month period, with between 300 and 400 mentions per day. Over a three month period there are 71,073 mentions. This is a healthy amount of conversation for such a well known company. The chart below shows that before the end of December 2009 the level of Eurostar chatter bubbled away nicely.
Fig 1: Eurostar conversation levels
There is a large spike in the conversation towards the end of December, when there were 8,955 Eurostar mentions in one day, 13% of all Eurostar conversation over three months occurred on that day. We know this is attributed towards the cancellation of services and the trains being stuck in the tunnel. From looking at a word cloud of the spike we can see that posts were largely negative towards Eurostar. In January conversation around Eurostar returns to similar levels as in 2009. However, the issue is brought back to the public’s attention on the 12th February when a review was published which criticised Eurostar for being unprepared for it’s pre-Christmas problems. There were 3,259 Eurostar related posts that day Again, this was more bad press for the train operator. However, the spike in conversation was not a drastic as the original in late December.
Fig 2: Frequently Used Words Around Eurostar's Spike in Conversation
The cloud shows the most frequently used words in Eurostar conversation from the December spike. Words associated with the company at this time were ‘chaos’, ‘breakdowns’, ‘cancellations’ and ‘havoc’. Clearly these are not kind of associations that Eurostar desire. Keeping track of the sentiment of spikes in conversation about your company can aid a strategy to tackle the negative and reward the positive.
Just as the criticism is instant through social media, the response and solution, even just in form of a statement or apology, should also be instant.
We can also visualise the sentiment expressed towards Eurostar over the three month period.
Fig 3: Sentiment Expressed Towards Eurostar through Social Media
From the above chart it is clear that a large amount of the conversation places a negative sentiment on Eurostar. 51% of the analysed posts had a negative sentiment towards Eurostar, and a slightly lower 48% were deemed to have positive sentiment.
While the passenger outrage seems to have died down in the new year, the release of a report into why the service failure occurred re-spark some negative sentiment. Reports released in February suggested Eurostar were not fully prepared to deal with such a major disruption to their service, and so more criticism is sure to follow.
As social media allows for sentiment to be expressed almost instantly and to there is a greater need for it to be monitored. Eurostar will no doubt recover from their pre-Christmas woes, but they would do well to ensure their reputation online is not tarnished in the long run!
