Great Western Coffee Shop

http://www.which.co.uk/home-and-garden/leisure/reviews-ns/best-and-worst-uk-train-companies/best-train-companies-overall/


and later


FGW comes in towards the top of that bottom six.

The shine has come off the sainted Chiltern's halo, hasn't it? It used to be the case that they'd regularly top such surveys: now they're below East Coast, Virgin, even "Miseryrail" and the LTS "Misery Line".

That LTS line has very, very good figures - no longer can it be called the "Misery Line. Reappraisal required, methinks

C2C regularly tops (or comes 2nd) in the league tables

Is it a coincidence that Hull Trains and Grand Central are open access operators ?

not at all.

I would think its easier to get it right for a smaller operator. Certainly in most lines of business it is easier for a small business to focus on good customer service against the big chains.

I'm sorry but that simply isn't the case - if you look at Businesses that are consistently top rated for Customer Service you will find the likes of John Lewis, M & S, Amazon, Waitrose, Waterstones, Amex, First Direct.........these are hardly small businesses, but they have made a commercial decision to make a culture of good customer service one of their differentiators/USPs, and they exist in highly competitive environments where a bad customer experience means that customers will transfer their business to a readily available alternative.

Some of the common themes about those companies/organisations who exhibit consistently bad customer service are that they are monopolies or have little direct competition, inelastic demand for their services, former public sector organisations who perceive that they have little need to focus on customer service over and above their core business or make good when things go wrong........this is why customers of Utility companies, TOCs etc are generally seen as being treated with indifference at best, contempt at worst.

Rubbish.  If you look at the table and look at the number of services each train company operates (these are rough figures obtained by a quick search) then the operators who run the most services, with a high frequency timetable, find themselves towards the bottom of the table.

Grand Central - 7 trains a day
First Hull Trains - 7 trains a day
Merseyrail - 800 trains a day
C2C - 350 trains a day
East Coast - 155 trains a day
Virgin Trains - 330 trains a day
Chiltern Railways - ?
London Overground - ?
London Midland - 1300 trains a day
Scotrail - 2400 trains a day
East Midlands Trains - 470 trains a day
FTPE - 300 trains a day
XC - 300 trains a day
ATW - 955 trains a day
Northern - 2500 trains a day
SWT - 1600 trains a day
FGW - 1600 trains a day
Anglia - 1900 trains a day
Southern - 2300 trains a day
South Eastern - 2000 trains a day
TSGN - ?
 
Running 7 trains a day is a lot easier to keep an eye on and supply accurate information compared to South Easterns 2300 trains running a high frequency timetable in the same way.  Running the likes of John Lewis, M&S, Amazon, Waitrose doesn't require decisions to be made at the drop of a hat, an instant outcome.  They may have hours, days, weeks, months to resolve customer issues.  On a railway, you get a matter of minutes and in those few minutes that's when the company gets judged on its customer service.

I don't think it's either courteous, mature or constructive to prefix a reply to another person's post as "Rubbish", however leaving that to one side if you read my post it referred to the assertion made by a previous contributor that "......in most lines of business its easier for a small business to focus on customer service against the big chains....."

I wasn't referring exclusively to the railways, but if the cap fits..............

And there is in any case a great deal more to a customer's perception of a business  than "making decisions on the spot in a matter of minutes".......read the original post where there were comments about value for money, cleanliness etc, and the attitude/helpfulness of staff, quality of information etc are also important as is the ease/straightforwardness/transparency of buying tickets etc.

.....but by all means if you don't want to believe me......


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/11103540/The-100-best-and-worst-companies-for-customer-service.html

It should be commented that the results of Which passenger survey with similar questions to that of Passenger Focus most recent survey do not even come close to similar results.
 
http://www.passengerfocus.org.uk/research/national-passenger-survey-introduction

Select the download

^National Rail Passenger Survey (NRPS) at a glance by train company - Autumn 2014

Then select FGW from that file.

FGW achieved 81% satisfaction in that survey.

I will take the passenger focus survey more seriously that the Which survey for the main reason that Which asked their readers, passenger focus asked actual passengers on the railway. I am not saying its the case but Which readers may not have as much first hand experience and made their responses based on the heavily negative stories that they read in the media.

Sorry - but "pedant alert".  I suspect that the figure for FGW is individual trains, but the figure for First Hull trains is round trips?   Makes no appreciable difference in this case - still a difference factor of over 100 - just asking ...


The Passenger Focus survey, though, leaves out the people who are so upset / unliking of the service that they don't use it, even though they might like to.   Looking back to the "bad old days", I recall a passenger survey of TransWilts passengers told us that 80% of people thought that the times of the services from Swindon (06:12 and 18:44) were "about right" - indeed it was 100% on the 06:12.   Problem was that only around 20 passengers a day left Swindon on these trains, and the others who should have loved the service but it wasn't timed right for them were excluded.

At one point, I challenged Passenger Focus about this exclusion, and they didn't deny the potential bias - but the did (rightly) point out that it wasn't going to be easy to find and include those other people.   The Which? approach may bias in the other direction, giving equal weight to the daily commuter and the once-a-year traveller.   I'm afraid everyone's data needs taking with a pinch of salt, and the best conclusion are comparative not absolute.

Which? surveys are generally very ambiguous.  The sample size is generally very small and there is very little detail into how the figures were calculated. 

Yep, you are correct.  7 return trips a day. It was only a quick google search!

Asking questions only of actual passengers, rather than of the population at large, would tend to skew the results towards the favourable. Some of the population consider some rail services to be so bad that they no longer patronise them, the views of such people are in my view valid but they will be excluded from rail industry surveys.

As an example I found the Thameslink service to be appalling and by far the worst of any TOC that I used regularly. It was so bad as to be a contributory factor in my decision to leave London.
My negative views regarding Thameslink certainly wont feature in any passenger surveys as I am no longer a Thameslink victim.
My negative views WOULD however be reflected in any survey among the wider population.
There must be many like me.

Rail industry surveys wont include people who have paid hundreds of pounds to stand for hours and then vowed "never again" and decided to drive instead.
A survey of the wider population would include those ex customers.

Taking someone's views who hasn't used the service for say a year or longer because of previous bad experiences it a terrible way of getting data. How do they know the service hasn't improved massively?
What relevance has how bad the service was 6 or 12 months ago got to do with now.

Alternatively, if you ask my friends and relatives who only travel on trains VERY infrequently they will say how great the service is.  This is because they travel off-peak, on days when the sun shines, pay less than ^4000 per ticket, and only when trains are running happily.   Whereas I, as a daily commuter come rain or shine, think it sucks.

I would argue that those who are minded to participate in surveys are those with agendas.  Therefore results skew towards the very happy or the very sour.

I think someone needs to do this - " there are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics"!  ;D

The only time I have been asked to fill out a Passenger Focus survey was on a one-off journey, which I've never done before or since. Luck of the draw I guess.

........or there could perhaps be a refreshing willingness to accept that (subject to the usual variations inherent in any survey) public opinion suggests that the Railway Industry needs to up its game and work harder at customer satisfaction, rather than circling the wagons and/or shooting the messenger?

Having been involved in some very localised "ask the customer / potential customer" exercises over the past year, I have to agree that it's difficult to interpret the results and indeed it's also possible to ask questions which bias the results.  The most reliable guidance that's practical to get from this sort of thing is by undertaking multiple studies in multiple ways, and also by comparing data across between similar operations within the same study.  On this basis, both Passenger Focus and Which? studies are worth a good look, even though both can also be argued individually to be flawed

A message to anyone asked to complete a survey when making a journey that's not your usual one.  Please complete the survey.  There will be other one-off users on other days and you represent them too - in some ways your response is more important than that of the regular passenger as you represent more people.  Many people refuse a survey because "it's my only use" and it's frustrating to the surveyor (or at least to the survey organisation) as it biases the results.

Firstly, I must declare my personal interest here: I work for Waitrose.

Waitrose is the retail grocery arm of the John Lewis Partnership - so it's probably not fair to treat them as two separate businesses, when comparing them with (just for example) First Great Western.  :-X

But I can assure you that I have been required to make decisions, "at the drop of a hat" to provide an instant outcome to the satisfaction of my customer: I certainly don't have "hours, days, weeks, months to resolve customer issues" as a delivery driver.  ;)