Sitting on the Virgin Train that was zooming me back to Coventry (much prefer it to the M1) I was enticed by a cheerful red sticker on the wall:

HOTSPOT: Wi-Fi from T-Mobile. Fast. Reliable

So I tried it. And it wasn’t. Now I do have some sympathy – delivering Wi-Fi from a fast moving train as it hurtles across the southern Midlands in an unseasonal snow-shower is probably quite tricky. But it didn’t work. And I had no mechanism to tell them about it. This started to really grate after about 15 minutes. Because I know a tiny amount about in-train Wi-Fi, and one of the gems lurking in the attic of my memory was that the technical operations teams can often correct problems and restart Wi-Fi services remotely…as long as they know there is a problem.

East Coast Trains manage this with a pretty simple mechanism – they have a text feedback route for customers to let them know how their journey is going. A Natural Language Processing engine on the back of it automatically identifies and routes the messages, so Wi-Fi alerts go to the Wi-Fi team – and the service is remotely and mysteriously restored.

Virgin doesn’t do this. But their customers certainly want to talk about it. And what happens if your customers want to talk to you about your service, but you don’t give them any route to tell you?

They tell the world. In the absence of any route to tell Virgin, their customers tweet their ‘delight’ about the Wi-Fi:

“Not so impressed with #virgin#wifi. Cannot get work done. Slows down and cuts out”“Ironically I am only tethering because #TMobile's wifi#Virgin trains is shockingly bad (takes 10 minutes just to log on)” service on

Once the tweet is out of the bag, it is available for the world to share. The only way to stop it is to make it quicker, easier, more convenient and totally immediate for the customer to talk to YOU FIRST. An excellent recovery process that might just get them thinking about how great you are—something probably worth tweeting about.