Staff and Customer Comments

[thelongestroad]

FGW have a periodically released list of customer complaints and customer appraisals which are found in most depots or messrooms. It's good to get some positive comments and read the more 'amusing' ones.

 

[jon0844]

That must have been me, I'll take the complement here, thanks!
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I suppose you are right, even though a more appropriate reply (in the scenario I mentioned) might be

"As you were informed at the time by the member of staff and your letter has confirmed to us, you were in breach of the NRCoC and railway bylaws (insert as appropriate), and not only was your behaviour causing a disturbance to passengers, your threats to staff were unacceptable. We will not proceed to prosecution on this occasion, but as your details are now on our file, if you are detected in any further breach, prosecution is likely to follow".

Although this would be in line with TOC's much-touted zero tolerance and 100% support of their staff when confronted by anti-social behaviour, I can't see it happening anytime soon.

You know what? If a TOC wrote a letter worded like that, I doubt anyone would say anything bad about it.

And anyone receiving it would struggle to even get the Daily Mail interested!

 

[87015]

Well I've been twittering this evening and can assure you the two bits of direct praise with traceable staff members were forwarded on to the local management with relevant higher level manager copied. We also usually get to see the letter that goes on file for it, and chase if we don't.

 

[Flamingo]

Does it really have to be so 'Us vs Them', Flamingo?

I didn't say complaints are not justified, or TOC's are not entitled to investigate them.

However, when the automatic response of the TOC is a "grovelling apology from your chief executive about you", as one chap who had verbally abused me (when I had the nerve to ask him to pay the excess to make his ticket valid) described it a few weeks later, (after a particularly vitriolic complaint), it makes me wonder why I issued a UFN to allow him complete his journey, and not just hold the train, call BTP, have him banged up for the night, and refuse to take the train any further because I was too shaken by the incident.

The fact that the train reached it's destination on time (and lots of other trains do as well) is because staff work them despite behaviour from some people that would not be tolerated in any other job. This is because we realise it is not a simplistic "Us and Them", but we have a lot of people relying on us to get to their destination.

However, when we do our best for the vast majority of these passengers, I would think that it's not unreasonable to expect a company, after investigating the complaint, to write an appropriate answer to the complainant, not something that they can take as a justification of what is sometime atrocious and illegal behaviour.