When will Northern Rail Customer Services Learn?

April 3, 2009

When i arrived at my local station this morning, a number of annoyed passengers were voicing their frustration since the earlier train had departed considerably earlier than the scheduled time of departure, resulting in them missing the train, but Northern Rail Customer Services response was even more annoying…

One of the passengers explained that he had called Northern Rail there and then to report this, and was assured by the customer services representative at Northern Rail that the electronic timing recording that Northern Rail utilise clearly showed that the train had left on time.

This was despite at least 10 or 15 people being witnesses to the contrary.

There are 2 possibilities:
1.That the system used by Northern Rail to record departure times is flawed, throwing doubt on all the performance figures for punctuality.

2.That the Northern Rail customer services representative did not check.

However, most concerning is the way that Customer Services at Northern Rail persistently appear to initially dismiss complaints made by customers rather than undertaking to investigate them.

I have personal experience of a response from Northern Rail where it was quite evident that the actual complaint was not going to be investigated. Another fellow traveller recently got resolution of a complaint again after Northern Rail initially attempted to dismiss his complaint.

Northern Rail need to learn that giving a first response to customer complaints that ammounts to a dismissal without them looking further into the facts is short sighted and totally unacceptable. It’s also a very risky practice in these days of internet feedback.

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