Which? - Annual Survey of Passenger Satisfaction

[whole diary]

[grahame]

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

Grand Central and First Hull Trains top our satisfaction survey
grand central logo 2015
Long-distance train company Grand Central tops our 2015 survey
Two small companies running just a handful of long-distance services a day triumphed in the Which? train satisfaction survey for 2015.

Grand Central runs just four trains a day each way between London and Bradford, and five between London and Sunderland. But it tops our satisfaction table with a customer score of 76%, the highest we've seen in four years of running the survey.

First Hull Trains, which operates seven daily services between London and Hull, is second with 69%.

and later

At the other extreme was Thameslink & Great Northern, operated by Govia Thameslink Railway, which took over the service from First Capital Connect in September 2014. For the purposes of this year^s survey, we combined responses about both companies to produce one customer score; an uninspiring 43%.

Passengers say almost everything about the service is poor, including value for money, cleanliness and punctuality. The age of the trains is also a common gripe.

One passenger told us: ^The trains are out of date and tatty, there aren^t enough carriages and the fares don^t reflect the level of service.^

The bottom six slots in the survey are all filled by operators that carry a higher proportion of harder-to-please commuters and cover congested parts of the network around London. None score above 50% and all are rated poor value.

FGW^▸ (First Great Western) comes in towards the top of that bottom six.

[Richard Fairhurst]

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".

[ChrisB]

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

[phile]

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

[ChrisB]

not at all.

[LiskeardRich]

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.

[TaplowGreen]

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^▸ (Train Operating Company) etc are generally seen as being treated with indifference at best, contempt at worst.

[a-driver]

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^» (First TransPennine Express - website) - 300 trains a day
XC^▸ (Cross Country Trains (franchise)) - 300 trains a day
ATW^▸ (Arriva Trains Wales (former TOC^▸ (Train Operating Company))) - 955 trains a day
Northern - 2500 trains a day
SWT^▸ (South West Trains) - 1600 trains a day
FGW^▸ (First Great Western) - 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.

[TaplowGreen]

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

[LiskeardRich]

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^▸ (Numerical Rating Pain Score (patient discomfort scale))) at a glance by train company - Autumn 2014

Then select FGW^▸ (First Great Western) 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.

[grahame]

First Hull Trains - 7 trains a day
FGW^▸ (First Great Western) - 1600 trains a day

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 ...

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.
 
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.

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.

[a-driver]

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. 

[a-driver]

First Hull Trains - 7 trains a day
FGW^▸ (First Great Western) - 1600 trains a day

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 ...

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

[broadgage]

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^▸ (Train Operating Company) 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.

[LiskeardRich]

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^▸ (Train Operating Company) 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.