Great Western Coffee Shop

Received from GWR Feedback or whatever you want to call them in August this year:

"We’ll also be replacing older trains that have just 3 carriages on our Cardiff-Bristol-Portsmouth route in 2017. We’ll be using our turbo trains for a much faster trip – they go at 90mph."

and in July (in relation to Bristol Suburban Services):

"Whist I know the delays that have affected your particular journeys have been really frustrating; overall we have been meeting our delay and cancellation performance targets in these areas, and in some cases outperforming them." and "We are confident we are heading in the right direction."

How can they say these things?  What is the point of cutting and pasting stuff like this?  Several years back GWR customer services used to be quite good.  Didn't it then get transferred offshore, before being brought back in-house again?  It's never been the same since.

GWR are very much aware that all is not roses in customer service responses, and that even if responses come from a still-somewhat outsourced third party system, that third party is acting of the agent of GWR and what they say is GWR's ultimate responsibility.  I am not writing just 'in theory' here, but rather after conversations within recent days at a very high level indeed; I expect GWR to be acting to make significant improvements in responses such that your experiences should no longer be so run-of-the-mill that we just roll our eyes.

P.S.  Welcome to the forum, Adrian. 

When is the rail ombudsman meant to be kicking in and would GWR suffer a financial hit for each case referred?

Reducing nonsensical replies could be beneficial to all parties.

"Being aware" of something means nothing. It's action that counts, not "conversations". GWR are 100% accountable for the performance of their suppliers.

They've been like this for well over a year. Almost as soon as the outsourcing took place it collapsed. Any competent organisation who outsources a function to an organisation of the size that GWR use should be all over them to improve their performance - I know because I manage this sort of thing every day.

It could of course be that GWR have set the bar so low with their KPIs (probably on the cheap) for the outsourced supplier that they are performing to specification, either way they are clearly incapable of managing the function to provide anywhere near an acceptable level of customer service.

Comes back to Customer Service culturally being at the bottom of the GWR list I'm afraid.

I expect to see action. May not be as deep, thorough, fast as some would like. But I expect to see action that hasn't thus far been seen.    Agree they are accountable for their suppliers - I might give them some leeway if we were talking about suppliers such as Network Rail where they had no choice of supply - but there's no leeway in this case.

There's just one action GWR should take.

Ditch Capita.

Possibly, but you need to understand what specification they were given to work to first, and consider the alternatives - are GWR willing to (re) invest in an entire Customer Service operation?

For example, if Capita were told that (for example) 90% of replies were expected within 28 days, they may well be working within their contractual tolerances.

In this sort of scenario, they may well have been given standard paras to use by GWR for the majority of their answers.

If Capita aren't doing anything "wrong" contractually, it would probably cost GWR a fortune to extract themselves from the arrangement, or insert variations to allow for stricter KPIs.

If they've been "crap" from Day 1, and are missing all their targets after this length of time, then you have to look at the way they are/the contract is being managed by GWR as well as their performance. In my experience it is often the way the contract has been let and is being managed as much as the performance of the outsourced agency, and that can only really be managed objectively, by comparing their performance against what is set out in the contract.

Capita aren't universally bad, although they do get an awful lot of bad Press.

Sometimes it's as much about looking at the discipline of the parents as well as the badly behaved child?