Transport For Wales: When Station Teams Said "All Clear" But Social Media Told a Different Story

The Challenge

Transport for Wales (TfW) is a dynamic train operating company that puts passenger experience, happiness, and safety at the forefront of everything they do. But during lockdown, they faced a critical question: "Is there more that can be done to help passengers making essential journeys feel safe?"

The problem? Passengers don't always complain in plain sight, or even in the same way—especially when talking about feeling safe.

With masses of social media mentions, survey data, and customer complaints sitting in silos, TfW needed an accurate and efficient way to analyse the data at scale. Getting to the root cause of issues quicker would mean they could take action on what mattered when it mattered most.

Finding a solution that let them confidently ditch manual data management was imperative to save the time and effort needed to identify and act on emerging trends.

The Solution

TfW set up social media mentions and public untagged tweets for tracking on the Wordnerds platform, then imported customer complaints and survey data for analysis. This meant they could analyse all their data on a large scale in one place and begin building a single, holistic view of their customers' voice.

The team trained and fine-tuned their own AI in the platform—not as technical or time-consuming as it sounds—enabling them to find and surface common themes within all their data.

This flexible solution allowed TfW to see issues impacting sentiment and trend how it was changing, group and analyse data by subjects they cared about with keyword and context searches, discover what customers were talking about right out of the box with unsupervised text clustering, and search conversations without having to second-guess every keyword customers might use.

The Impact

An early finding revealed how passengers felt about their safety during the third lockdown—sentiment that didn't reflect the high standards the brand had set for itself.

Taking this to the next level, TfW commissioned a deep dive analysis exploring issues passengers weren't flagging directly, hidden in untagged social comments.

The revelation: concerns around onboard mask compliance, despite assurances from station teams that they were enforcing the rules.

Mike, TfW's Insight & Innovation Manager, presented this finding at the weekly board meeting and requested action. TfW used the insight to alert onboard teams and increase messaging and enforcement around compliance.

As a result of this proactive approach, TfW saw mask compliance sentiment ascend into positive territory in the following reporting period. They were better able to help passengers feel safe whilst restrictions were in place.

According to Graeme Baldock, Resource Planning and Analysis Manager: "We have been able to add real depth to the validity of all our numbers, being able to pinpoint, highlight and really home in on the issues that matter to our customers and be able to present the power of those issues to all stakeholders. As a result we have seen several major changes already to customer journeys."

Wordnerds now provides TfW with real-time actionable insights from social conversations around performance issues, key stations, and passenger experiences to find areas for improvement.