London Underground management have reported on the trial of 'Textback', the conclusion of which is that it was so ineffective that it will not be rolled out across the Underground as previously planned. Textback is a system whereby passengers are invited to text their comments about the service to the company, and the trial, originally planned for Harrow-on-the-Hill group, was run on the Rickmansworth group. You can read some background here.

Management reported to the Strategy and Development Forum on 14 May that they were 8 weeks into an 11-week trial, and were missing one week's data because a contractor drilled through a cable. The data they did have showed that just 356 texts had been received from a group of stations which hosts 29,000 customers per day. We reckon that works out at about 35 texts per week, or 5 per day - out of 29,000 people! Given that the trial cost around £15,000, that works out as over £40 per text received!

While management report that a few useful suggestions were received from customers, eg. keeping notices up-to-date, RMT argued that they could get ideas like this simply by listening to staff.

RMT had objected to Textback all along, so had the company listened to us, it could have saved £15,000 and a lot of time and effort.