There are plenty of people rushing to judge Eurostar this weekend. The headline on TechCrunch is almost comical – “As hundreds of Eurostar passengers languish, Eurostar ignores Twitter.” On the face of it, it’s rather like saying “As shelves run dry of food, Tesco ignores Susan Boyle.” It’s quite random. TechCrunch’s view of the issue is pretty narrow (as this post from We are social shows.)

The whole communications effort could have been better, and the speed of the social media response is just one symptom – hopefully Eurostar will take some lessons away from this weekend.

Where did Eurostar go wrong?

  • It’s worth saying that when it comes to PR, Eurostar were unlucky – as ever there’s not a lot of news around at Christmas, and this is a big story which is relatively low effort / low cost to cover.  Dramatic though it is, is it really a bigger story than a vulnerable toddler being abducted from a police station? Personally I don’t believe so – but there are unfortunately a lot of angry passengers in the Eurostar story who are able to keep the story running.
  • It sounds like there was confusion in Eurostar HQ – We are social’s Robin Grant describes grabbing the chief executive for a minute “in between various crisis meetings”, and being sat alongside the Sales and Marketing Director.  In a situation as fast moving and high profile as this, the key people could have worked better together if they had been co-located in one room. It would have been good to see Eurostar’s crisis team validate or update their corporate message every thirty minutes, while managing the operational challenge.
  • I think Eurostar could have picked a better core message – the explanation offered about changes in temperature affecting the trains left more questions than answers. Over time it looked like the company didn’t know what was causing the breakdowns, so it would have been more credible to say “we don’t know what’s happened to the trains, but we’re working as fast as possible to understand it.” There was also an attempt to move too quickly to the final stage of the comms plan – the review and compensation line – when practical operational comms to passengers was needed.
  • Eurostar could have used a different spokesperson – I remember watching The Bottom Line on BBC News earlier this year and thinking that Richard Brown came across as a great business leader who had built a formidable operation.  It doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s the best spokesperson for the company in a crisis, as I think the video below shows. The delivery could have been more confident, and the subliminal messages (eg how the picture has been framed)  don’t shout “we have lots of staff working to fix this, and we’re in control.”
  • Finally, and most seriously, Eurostar’s internal communications structures, and their face to face communication with customers appear to have failed. Staff weren’t visible to customers, and those staff who were dealing with customers followed different procedures and gave conflicting messages, and the people who needed the most communication – those in the broken down trains – were the people who received the least.An urgent review is needed to establish crisis comms protocols for staff which rectify the  situation which Robin Grant describes as being unable “to communicate with their own staff on board when the train is in the tunnel as all safety regulations and operational responsibility sit firmly with Eurotunnel.” Assuming that is true, EuroTunnel’s procedures would seem to have cost Eurostar hundreds of thousands of pounds in customer loyalty and brand damage. Their press release titled “EuroTunnel rescues Eurostar” (PDF) will need  a robust reply.

Where do Eurostar go from here?

In short:

  • Rapidly and transparently announce the likely cause of the fault when it is established, and how it can be mitigated. Put the media and some key social media critics on a successful test run and make the engineers visible.
  • Proactively reach their customers with any further news on all comms channels – by text message, email, face to face and yes, social media.
  • Look after the passengers – free food and drink at St Pancras and Ebbsfleet. Passengers are talking to the media all the time and no part of the message coming from them is “Eurostar are doing their best to look after us.”
  • Use a broader range of spokespeople  – most board level leaders with media skills can fulfil this role.
  • Talk to past customers directly – I receive Eurostar marketing emails as a previous customer, and as a potential future customer I have now have concerns about using the service in cold weather – use that marketing data to drive reassurance and reputation rebuilding comms

I do have sympathy for Eurostar’s comms team – it sounds from the outside like they simply lacked any facts to communicate beyond the number of broken down trains. In the long term that internal comunications challenge is the most serious issue to address.

If you’re reading this and you work in Eurostar comms, I hope your Christmas gets better from here on!