It is with huge regret that we have announce that we have to suspend our recent experimental social media work, due to economic constraints. This includes the bathcsc.info blog, the @bathcsc Twitter account and our Bath Bus Station Customer Services Facebook page.
Unfortunately, due to the current economic climate, First is having to make changes to its business structure. As part of making the company more cost efficient, the Customer Services function for Bath Bus Station will now be handled by a specialist, area-wide centre based at Exeter. As a result, the local staff here at Bath Bus Station will be reduced in number and sadly there will be no resources available to maintain our recent social media activity.
We will continue to respond to comments and queries until Friday 26th June. We will leave resources, such as this blog, online for everyone’s reference, which we hope will be of use to you all.
After 26th June, if you require any advice about our services, or wish to make a comment about any aspect of our operation, you can still do so by telephoning 0845 606 4446 or by emailing bath.csc@firstgroup.com. Your comments will still be fully investigated and taken very seriously.
We have very much enjoyed interacting with you all through social media and hope that you have all found this useful and enlightening as you used our buses. This experiment has been extremely interesting for us and we hope that First will be in a position to consider this approach to Customer Services again in the future, when the economic climate allows.
In the meantime, thank you so much to all of you who have supported us. We hope you continue to enjoy using First buses in Bath! 
10 comments
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June 19, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Alex Cox
I was pleasantly surprised to see First providing a cutting-edge service which brought it closer to its users and provided easily accessible, friendly information to those who rely upon its busses.
I am unpleasantly unsurprised to see said service — and presumably some valuable staff — trashed. It is a real shame. Facetiously, I fully expect a forthcoming fare price rise to pay for the reshuffle.
Thankyou to whoever it was that provided the service — you did a great job. I do hope the statement about reconsidering when the time is right is true.
June 19, 2009 at 2:52 pm
bathcsc
Thank you Alex! I genuinely hope they will!
I will be passing all comments made via twitter and this blog about the closure to the appropriate authorities within the company. However, if you do feel you wish to contact First direct about this decision, please either write to the Area Operations Director at Enterprise House, Easton Rd, Lawrence Hill, Bristol… or email bath.csc@firstgroup.com and mark for the attention of the Area Operations Director. My colleagues that are now managing this email account will forward your comments straight on for you.
We are really, really sad to make this announcement. Thank you for your kind words.
June 19, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Alison Wildish
I echo the words of Alex Cox in that this work certainly took First closer to its users. This service was invaluable to staff and students of the University of Bath during the snow in February and has proved incredibly useful ever since.
From a University perspective we had hoped to work with you to expand on these services so it is a real shame to see them go.
With the new U18 service available to our students I’m sure competition is a concern. So I am saddened to see the demise of a real differentiator (your customer service approach) being dropped.
Very well done to all concerned. You did a great job!
Alison Wildish
Head of Web Services
University of Bath
June 19, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Richard Pitkin
I’m really sad to see this service go. It was really refreshing to see a company directly engaging with its customers in this way and providing up to the minute reports that I’m sure have saved many a wasted journey (or at least given them peace of mind when they were delayed).
The Twitter updates have been a huge help to travellers that have been following them during the recent round of building works in the city center. I hope that First will find some way to keep its customers as informed in the future.
I’d also like to commend the friendly style of the Bathcsc blog which has kept me amused and informed many a time.
I can imagine I wont be the only one to regret this services passing
June 19, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Chris Wotton
What a shame that First decide, when the going gets tough, to cut services which are actually appreciated by its customers. The service has been fantastic, a real development of customer service and a real show of initiative – as Alison said above, absolutely a differentiator between you and the competition. There was, as she also said, much potential for development of the service – integration with the Bath Uni web site, the Bath SU web site and even with the Bath Uni student newspaper (Impact) web site, which I’ll be news editor of next year. Well done to everyone involved in this, a really good job all round – it’s just a huge shame that the powers that be only ever saw it as an ‘experiment’ rather than something customers genuinely appreciated, and that they would rather line their executives’ pockets than keep their customers happy. What’s the moral of the story, then? There might be a few well-meaning staff on the shop floor, but First as a whole doesn’t change…just as disinterested in its customers as ever.
June 20, 2009 at 11:45 am
Simon
Well done First.
Yet another own-goal that shows the obsession with ‘bottom line’ profit over the needs and interests of passengers (and the staff).
Reconsider please.
June 22, 2009 at 12:19 am
Me
That will be our office doing it then – explains why they have been shuffling more staff into the small contracts* cupboard with newbies replacing
*as opposed to the main office which does Traveline
June 22, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Mark
Funny time to pull this, with the new bus station just open, the city centre redevelopment alongside imposing every need to rebuild passenger numbers in Bath, and UK bus profits up nearly 10 percent at £134 million as of the end of March this year. At least you can be proud of yourselves for playing your part in last year’s success. An opportunity missed for First.
June 23, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Neil
Typical… the first time I get to hear about FirstBus Bath’s Blog, is when I discover it’s being closed down!
Like many people, I’m a busy person. Similarly, I don’t use the bus station as often as some (I live in the city centre, so I use Shank’s Pony for a lot of my short trips)…
… but that doesn’t mean that I won’t ever be interested to find out about services at the new Bus Station! Like many, I am TRYING to find ways to use buses more – but like many, I’m finding it can sometimes be a BIG CHALLENGE to get all the necessary info together (prices, routes, times, changes, stop-locations, etc)… Even FirstBus’s main website doesn’t give ALL the information needed to make a journey seamlessly (I had to call the 0845 number today, to find out prices of tickets on the X39 service, because they’re not on the website, for example!)
Speaking, like many probably, as someone who will usually ‘leap into my car’ as the first option, but secretly believing I ‘ought to do more’ to go on public transport, even though it costs more, and can be a royal pain in the neck to organise (especially with an eight-month old baby in tow), something like a live blog seems a VERY SENSIBLE IDEA for making things less tedious to organise…
…So why cut this great idea?
Surely the costs aren’t THAT prohibitive – you’re a private sector organisation, so presumably it doesn’t cost you eight billion quid to run a blog (like it would if you were run by a council!) You probably already run your own webservers, and presumably you can pool them across a whole bunch of FirstGroup related services anyway… so how much saving are you REALLY going to make by cutting this, eh? Less than a grand a year, I’d say (and probably a lot less).
I guess I’m not alone in taking my time even to discover the existence of such a service – there will be many more people who are only just now thinking “Oh… so there was a live, realtime-updated FirstBus Bath blog on the web, was there? I never knew that! Shame it’s closing… I would’ve used it, had I known of its existence. Wonder why they never advertised it around town?”
Instead of cutting these sorts of service, you need to let them bubble away, growing their user-bases, gradually seeping into the local popular consciousness, becoming important as time passes and as people slowly catch on. Then you might actually discover that people make more ready use of them, and they become vibrant, essential clearing-houses of information that enable you to make savings on other, more ‘hands-on’ support services (like paying the medical bills of some poor, overworked or verbally- and physically-assaulted member of staff on the front-line desks in the bus-station!).
Build it, and they will come… but if you bale out on the first try, people are going to think you’re feeble. Or that you just don’t really care about being perceived as a cutting-edge service provider at all, and it was just a (poorly-publicised) gimmick.
June 26, 2009 at 9:06 am
JISC-PoWR » Blog Archive » Some Use Cases For Preserving Twitter Posts
[...] as a daily bus user, I personally found the Twitter service very useful) as can be gauged from the comments on the blog to the announcement of the demise of the service and on the Bus station Twitter project ends [...]