Planning and implementing a strategy for improving Customer Information, particularly in times of disruption.
South West Trains is part of the Stagecoach Group. South West Trains runs 1,698 trains every weekday, transporting 400,000 people, serving 213 stations and employing around 5,300 staff.
South West Trains are one of the largest Train Operating Companies in the United Kingdom. They operate commuter trains in and out of London ‘s Waterloo Station to 174 stations across the South East of London, South West of London stretching as far as Weymouth. In common with nearly all Train Operating Companies in the UK, South West Trains have had a consistent issue in providing good, accurate and consistent information to customers at times of disruption. This is reflected in poor National Passenger Survey (NPS) scores for how they dealt with delays.
As one of a number of major improvement projects within South West Trains, they wanted to improve the NPS score having tried unsuccessfully for 2 years to raise the score through internal programmes. CCL having carried out some successful work in South West Trains call centre, were invited to facilitate a South West Trains team to identify the root causes of the problem and put together an implementation plan that would improve the information provided to customers at times of disruption and therefore the NPS scores.
CCL facilitated the initial fact find and this resulted in a board paper being presented to the South West Trains Board in January 2005. Core elements of the project recommended:
- The definition of an end-to-end process for providing customer information
- Improvements to the IT and Communications infrastructure and the way it is managed
- The introduction of inter-departmental service level agreements and robust processes to measure these
- Specific detailed processes for all customer facing staff to follow at times of disruption
- and a new style of briefing and training in order to make sure that all staff understood the context for the new processes, what was needed from them and giving them the skills appropriate to do the job.
The board paper also included the production of a measurement and feedback system that was later integrated with the management effectiveness work strand to provide the basis for a staff performance management system and for a continuous improvement process.
Initially the Board were only prepared to put part of the money to support the business case as being a ‘soft’ project there were no tangible deliverables. Having said that, South West Trains had invested in the previous couple of years £16.5m on a new Customer Information System (CIS) and therefore wanted to make sure that this system was used as effectively as possible in improving information for customers.
The Customer Information in Disruption project (CIDD) was much more wide ranging that just the CIS system. The project started looking at disruption information provided by Network Rail, evaluated how Control dealt with that information and then disseminated it through the organisation, and then explored what people did with that information and whether they adhered to processes or not. Over a 9 month period a team from CCL was intimately involved in facilitating and designing detailed processes for guards, station staff, management and various other parts of the organisation in order to ensure the processes were designed in a customer friendly way and that the project did not get bogged down in interdepartmental disagreements or other political issues. CCL’s role spanned very detailed implementation work through to Board escalation of issues in order to ensure the programme stayed on line and was delivered within the constraints of keeping the railway running to the best possible outcome.
The results of the programme were that the NPS score for ‘How we deal with Delays’ increased from 29% prior to this commencement of implementation to 46% a year later. Anecdotal feedback from passengers shows that significantly improved customer satisfaction and staff satisfaction seems to have similarly improved as the information flow within the company has dramatically improved as well.
The implementation of a customer information department and a regular customer information pack continues to ensure management focus on this issue and the desire is to further improve on these scores.
In addition to the improvements on Customer Information, South West Trains also won Rail Operator of the Year, one of the CIDD project team won Customer Service Operator of the Year and South West Trains have also made significant improvements to their overall performance.
