At an absolute minimum, customer service channels such as Twitter should not be closing in the early evening when these sort of (increasingly frequent) meltdowns are ongoing - it never used to close so early, then we had a spate of early closures due to "staff sickness", and since then it closes at 7pm every day - it really doesn't take long to train someone to answer Tweets, and it's a means by which customers at home/in the office can make an informed decision as to whether it's worth trying to travel.
In defense of anyone working on the task of fielding enquiries via social media, carrying that role out well does draw on various skills.
That aside, there's an argument in favour of the railway changing the tools they use for this. Twitter very much proved its worth for timely customer support, and it might be that a response to an individual enquiry helped several others in the process and also possibly helped staff be informed of situations.
'X' has very much changed in the way it works and is now a closed system, its content not available on the web, responses are available only to people with an account and logged in. A percentage of people who use the trains have moved away from 'X' entirely and companies who use 'X', given the general shenanigans, are starting to see a certain amount of tarnishing of their brand.
Perhaps railway managers view social media for customer support in times of disruption isn't as useful as it once was - evidenced by the fact that the hours of the day during which rail companies offer support via 'X' are shrinking, and there's less of an effort to react to events by strengthening this support in time of need.
One of the decisions to be made is whether to let this slide continue, or as an alternative, follow the users of their services to the social media that they now use.
GWR▸ looks to be on the way to doing this, in that they've created their account on Bluesky (~35 million users of which ~7.5% are in the
UK▸ ) and are using it for the time being for promotion rather than customer support.
Now, it's very difficult for an organisation to walk away from an account where they see they have a million followers, so, it would be informative to know the cost implications in using both of these two platforms in parallel for customer support - given the tools that they'll be using, the additional task would likely be a small percentage, and for a considerable gain in terms of reach. One aspect alone, the open-ness and far greater availablity of other systems, is well worth consideration.
Mark
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