‘Mission 5 Minutes’ is the newest initiative by South Central Railways’ Secunderabad Division. Under this mission, queries on the Social Media platform, ‘Twitter’ will be responded to within 5 minutes. The Twitter account of divisional railway manager (@drmsecunderabad) is a powerful interface that effectively handles passenger complaints and suggestions, and provides the necessary guidance when required. Passengers can tweet if they face an issue with any aspect of their train travel, for example – coach maintenance, cleanliness, security, electrical and for medical/catering assistance, etc.
The above-mentioned Twitter handle (@drmsecunderabad) is monitored 24*7 by a dedicated staff. The monitoring team assigns the ‘relevant tweets’ to the concerned officials for the quickest response. According to reports, the average response time was found out to be 4.07 minutes for the 185 tweets received in the first week of June.
35 passengers re-tweeted about the quick response after being completely satisfied with the action taken to resolve their queries. For instance, when a passenger of Secunderabad-Nagpur Express tweeted about an issue with the berth allocation at 09:43 PM, his tweet was assigned to the concerned department at about 09:48 PM and the problem was resolved promptly before the train’s departure at 10:00 PM. The happy passenger tweeted back saying ‘’Issue solved in less than 5 minutes before train departure….Thank you very much for your prompt response sir…….can sleep in peace now”.
Passengers that do not use Twitter can call on 182 for security related issues and 138 helpline for other security issues, for real-time assistance.
