Should ticket office clerk training be reviewed and improved.

[stadler]

Is it time that the railway industry takes a look at the training that ticket office clerks are given? Should we be reviewing this and seeing if the current training is sufficient?

Personally i prefer ticket offices to ticket machines as i like speaking to an actual human. Most clerks are great. There are some clerks at my local stations who are extremely knowledgeable and really helpful people who will happily sell you the best ticket or any ticket you ask for.

But you also get a bunch of clueless and jobsworth clerks who have no clue how to do there job. I call these people an advertisement for ticket office closures. So the quality varies massively depending on the clerk. This is the same for all train companies. They all seem to have lots of great knowledgeable clerks but also some useless clerks.

There is one ticket office clerk that refuses to let me use a rail travel voucher unless i show my passport and a recent utility bill and the letter that came with the voucher. So i have to have all of that or he refuses to let me pay with it. I have had on all three times i have tried paying with a rtv when he is on duty. He claims it is the rules and you have to show the letter that came with it plus a utility bill plus a passport to make sure that you are the right person and that your address and name matches. But no other clerk does this. With every other clerk i simply hand over the rtv as payment and that is it. So i think he is just clueless and making up nonsense.

Then there are a couple clerks at two ticket offices who refuse to sell tickets from another station. So they will only sell tickets with an origin of the station they are at. Sometimes i like to buy a ticket from further down the line if i am returning to a different station or if it is cheaper. This is perfectly valid and allowed as you can start your start your journey halfway. Most clerks have no issue selling tickets from another station. But there are a couple clerks at two ticket offices in particular that completely refuse to sell tickets from another station and claim it is not allowed.

I also have an annual season currently for one route that i travel on often and it is printed on normal orange 9599 stock. It supposed to be printed on special annual gold card stock and this is what has always been done every year in the past. But when i purchased it recently the clerk seemed to have no clue about other stocks. I questioned him and he had no idea about gold card stock. I am guessing he was new or sells very few season tickets. It is not the biggest issue as the season ticket is still perfectly valid but i now have an annual season ticket on the orange 9599 stock instead of the proper gold card stock.

Then just last weekend i came across a clueless clerk who claims that peak restrictions apply on saturdays and sundays. He refused to let me or the person in front of me buy an off peak or super off peak ticket because it was too early in the morning. He honestly thought that peak restrictions applied on saturdays and sundays.

These are just some examples of clerks being utterly clueless. Like i say this is not all of them. I know of many fantastic ticket office clerks who are extremely knowledgeable on all tickets and ticketing matters. But what really annoys me is how the quality varies massively depending on the clerk.

So the question is are the clerks being sufficiently trained? Should the train companies be providing better more thorough and advanced training?

The fact that some clerks are great and others are useless makes me wonder why? Are the good ones longer serving employees and the training has gone downhill in recent years?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Yes. I've had lots of terrible service from booking offices. More often than not in fact.

If we are to keep them it needs to be on the basis of very highly trained, well motivated experts offering verified, frequently tested high quality service.

Otherwise we'd be best getting rid.

 

[jfollows]

It’s a bigger problem because it appears that staff training across the board is poor. People manning gatelines not knowing the rules, people issuing penalties not knowing the rules. It appears there’s a tacit understanding that it’s OK to make up rules when you don’t know them, even if the customer insists they’re right, rather than go and look up the rules.
To be fair, this is from reports here and in the press, my local station is fine and happy either to believe me or to go and look things up.

 

[sprunt]

There is one ticket office clerk that refuses to let me use a rail travel voucher unless i show my passport and a recent utility bill and the letter that came with the voucher. So i have to have all of that or he refuses to let me pay with it. I have had on all three times i have tried paying with a rtv when he is on duty. He claims it is the rules and you have to show the letter that came with it plus a utility bill plus a passport to make sure that you are the right person and that your address and name matches. But no other clerk does this. With every other clerk i simply hand over the rtv as payment and that is it. So i think he is just clueless and making up nonsense.

So does anyone know whether this is actually the rule and he's being a jobsworth while the other clerks don't bother because, let's face it, there's no harm done if the "wrong" person uses an rtv, or if it is just nonsense he's making up?

On the wider issue, if some of the clerks are more knowledgeable than others then there are two possibilities:

1. The training is inadequate, and some conscientious clerks are going over and above to find out more (in which case well done them, but with no criticism aimed at their colleagues since it's the employer's job to make sure the staff are properly trained)

2. The training is fine, but some of the clerks just don't do the job properly.

No idea which is the case.

 

[Bletchleyite]

No, it's not the rule.

RTVs are usually marked not transferable, but there's no rule that they have to check identification.