Great Western Coffee Shop

On a positive note, I sent two EMails to FGW customer relations today, and received full and adequate responses to both within 30 minutes. In fact one reply arrived even before the automated ("you may have to wait 5 days") response. This included confirmation of compensation for the disruption on 7 March. This gives me a first impression of a well resourced and organised customer relations unit. I wonder if others have had a similar experience?

Yes,  I wrote and got a reply within 2 hours on 23rd of this month - a huge improvement.  There was a clear indication that the agent replying had read my question too, as the answer was personalised and quoted parts of the question back to me.

I think the unit has always been very well organised, although it was certainly under-resourced for a time.  FGW's customer service director has told us (at several meetings I've attended recently) that they've added to the team and it looks like the resources are now good too.   Just one fly in the ointment - judging by the reply sent to me, they're still using the system to make the points that they want / say something that doesn't actually answer the question asked at times.

A further follow up .... I've always admired First for doing pretty well in the "consistant answers" stakes - no matter who you write to as a mere customer, you'll get a polite response, and that response will be nearly identical no matter  who you wrote to in the First place.   I've always suspected co-ordination and indeed, in a rare slipup, I've received an internal note from xxxx to yyyy discussing the co-ordination of replies to passenger zzzz, noting that "he always writes to us and to you".  Not necessarily a bad thing, but I sometimes feel that the PR machine, tuned to produce the same answers at all input / output points, can get in the way of reallity when the answers it gives are to the questions that the company wants to answer rather than tothe question actually asked.