“Swat.io Has Completely Eased the Strain on our Decentralized Team”

Social media provides the ÖBB with a window onto its target group. The group sees community management as an important part of communication and aims to really integrate its community. Social media users aren’t confronted with a faceless ticket machine; instead, they invite the company into their homes. The aim is to establish long-term relationships with their target groups.

Community management and customer service on social media are important elements of the ÖBB’s brand image. Interactions on social media channels translate into key figures in internal reporting, which is shared with the management board. The company is firmly focused on cultivating relationships with prospective users. Every social media post is an opportunity for interaction, so unanswered comments are a squandered opportunity. Even negative comments can benefit the brand. When community management helps the user and improves their mood? That’s a clear win.

At the ÖBB, the challenges in community management are the complexity of the company itself and the sheer variety of potential queries. When the team gets to work they have no idea which questions and subjects they’ll be dealing with that day. That means they need answers for a huge range of subjects ready to go – different trains, destinations and stations, ÖBB as an employer and so on.

At the same time, the team wants to know what the community thinks and get them involved. In fact, decision-making is increasingly turned over to users. What should the new tunnel boring machine be called? Where should they put the logo on a new train?

To respond to questions promptly, the community management team has to get answers from different departments quickly. Swat.io allows them to forward tickets to the right person by email and get feedback. Responses from the relevant department appear directly in the activity log for the ticket. This is particularly important given that the team works in shifts. Who received the query, whether they’ve responded – this is transparent at all times, with no need for handover between shifts.

Swat.io lets the community management team inform co-workers about tickets or obtain assistance whenever they need. And the activity log allows them to make internal notes on tickets and ask co-workers for help. This traceability is especially important for escalation in the event of a crisis. When a ticket becomes critical, the team tags someone from Group Communications in the tool. This allows for strategic intervention at any point.

The ÖBB uses the analysis tool in Swat.io to investigate how the community responds to communications and the current top issues among users. This data is prepared internally to substantiate the importance of social media and community management for the group. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the management board is keen to find out exactly how the crisis is reflected in social media channels. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis provides answers.

The team uses tags to assign all tickets and posts to themes. “Corona” was assigned as a tag back in February 2020, and they’ve been tracking the topic ever since. The start of the pandemic brought numerous questions about ticket cancellations; users later reported that they missed train travel or asked questions about mask rules. Through sentiment analysis, ÖBB could see how the mood of the community changed over time and in relation to certain topics. The number of tickets and the response times reveal how hard the team was working over this period. Swat.io made it easy for the ÖBB to run this extensive reporting across all channels.