You've Been Cromwelled!

In one of the many updates in part one of this saga I mentioned a company called The Listening Company, who are the company who Southeastern have outsourced their customer services to. (No you can’t make this crap up). Armed with their email address I sent an email to The Listening Company with a link to Part One of the Private Police State, and quick instructions to find out for themselves how widely this story was being spread (Thanks to all of you who have postd links on Twitter and blogged about it, please keep it up) and explained that I wasn’t happy that I’d not heard from Souteastern, and that by association The Listening Company was bound to be tarred with the same brush.

Not being happy at all with the level of “customer service” I thought I’d try another tactic. Southeastern is owned/operated by GoVia which is a partnership made of of two other companies Go-Ahead and Keolis. Senior members of staff of all three organisations received a similar email to the one I sent to The Listening Company.

Shortly after I sent those emails I finally received an email from TLC, it’s only taken them 4 days…

This from their marketing manager

Dear Sir

Further to receiving your email this morning I would like to assure you that Southeastern has received your communications and will be in touch with you shortly.

Kind Regards

They must have had a good think about it, before they “expedited” my original mail. About 10 minutes later I received this from Southeastern:

Dear Mr Cromwell

Thank you for your website comment received by us on Sunday 25 July. I’m sorry our response has taken a couple of days longer than usual – this is because our system recognised your email as potential ‘junk’. This is likely to be because of the number of hyphens and the word ‘admin’ in your email address. However we do regularly check the ‘junk’ folder to ensure that we don’t overlook any correspondence.

I note your experience on Saturday 24 July and that you feel you were delayed incorrectly by our employees.

You may be interested to know that we have a ‘frequently asked question’ section on our website, which includes a question (number 21) about taking photos at our stations. Here’s the text:

As a general rule members of the public are free to take photos of our trains and the stations we manage and are welcome to do so. If any of our employees are likely to feature in your pictures we’d appreciate you asking for their permission whenever possible.

We ask that photographers only go onto areas that are open to the general public and don’t cause an obstruction to passengers or staff. And ideally we ask that photographers taking more than just a few ’snapshots’ seek permission from us prior to taking photos, however we realise this is not always possible in practice.

We must also stress that flash photography must not to be used as this can be a distraction for train drivers.

Our local station staff occasionally may ask photographers not to take pictures and move to another part of the station or leave the station. We’ll always explain why this is necessary. And if this does happen please understand that our staff have many things to consider including safety and security of all passengers and so will use their judgement in this regard.

Permission should be sought for any photographs taken of our trains and property for publication purposes. Enthusiast photographers can take photographs at stations for private purposes, provided they are not sold except to enthusiast magazines.

Finally along with all operators Southeastern supports the Guidelines for Rail Enthusiasts which help remind enthusiasts of their responsibilities when visiting stations.

These guidelines were written with the help of railway enthusiasts and photographers and I hope demonstrate that we wish to be reasonable and also expect passengers and photographers to behave in a reasonable way too. I’d like to draw your attention to the request we make for Southeastern to give permission for photographs to be published.

I hope you will appreciate that there’s a difference between taking general photographs of trains and stations for personal use and taking pictures of members of staff specifically to be published. Taking photographs of individual staff members may well feel intrusive to the individuals concerned.

A copy of your complaint has been forwarded to the manager responsible for our revenue protection team and they will investigate and take any action necessary.

I note that you request payment for your time on Saturday, but I must say this is something that we will not provide. I’m sorry this will not be the news you hoped to hear.

I trust that this email has answered the points you wanted to raise with us.

Yours sincerely

Lisa McGrath
Southeastern

Please do not reply to this email. We are unable to respond to emails we receive at this address. If you’d like to email us another question or comment please use our email contact webform:

http://www.southeasternrailway.co.uk/about-us/contact-us/

Oh dear…. Where.To.Start?

Lady if by regular you mean you check your “potential junk mail folder” every four days it’s no bloody wonder your customer service seems so damned shoddy.
Call me a cynic, but it’s just too darned coincidental that when I start contacting senior management things all of the sudden get done. I’m a cynic but I’m going to go out on a limb here and call you a flat out liar, see the pretty picture below:

Yes that’s an automated email from yourselves stating my comment has been sent. Very weird that an auto-reply would be set up on a junk folder don’t you say?

I note your experience on Saturday 24 July and that you feel you were delayed incorrectly by our employees.

No I don’t feel I was incorrectly delayed. I was incorrectly delayed. If this is your way of saying you think your staff were justified, you have a whole heap of trouble coming your way.

No I’m not interested in you FAQs simply because I didn’t and won’t be carrying a set of them around with me every time I travel on the train. Could you clarify exactly what you mean by “As a general rule”? Is it a condition of carriage? Is it a byelaw? What?

These guidelines were written with the help of railway enthusiasts and photographers and I hope demonstrate that we wish to be reasonable and also expect passengers and photographers to behave in a reasonable way too. I’d like to draw your attention to the request we make for Southeastern to give permission for photographs to be published.

I’m not a railway enthusiast, nor am I a photographer. I was a passenger. It might come as a surprise to you but even customers have civil liberties and I was acting in a reasonable manner when I refused to delete those pictures. If you’d actually taken the time to read the complaint, and indeed my article you will have noticed that I didn’t actually go to the station to take pictures that would be published, it was a spontaneous reaction to seeing the REOs. It was because of the behaviour of your employees that the pictures got published. If they hadn’t reacted and acted illegally the pictures would never really have been publshed.

Readers I’d like you to note this:

I trust that this email has answered the points you wanted to raise with us.

And then this:

Please do not reply to this email. We are unable to respond to emails we receive at this address.

Yes the email address that this email originated from is indeed not manned (I checked), so Southeasterns customer service policy is this.

Complain
Wait
Wait
Prod the complaint along
Get an unsatisfactory answer where they assume you’ll be happy with what they’ve said, but not give you the means of replying straight back to the person who’s dealing with the complaint if you’re not happy with their reply.
Suggest customers use the online form again.

Jesus wept.

I replied to Lisa by sending an email to the address that’s not manned, advising that I’d be at the Meet the Manager event at Victoria station tomorrow. I hope she got it. If not the senior management got an email anyway.

If all goes according to plan tomorrow not only will I be at the event, I’ll be accompanied by a journalist.

Oh I’m declining your request to ask permission to take pictures of your staff. I’ve never had to ask soldiers, the Queen, bands, celebrities etc for permission to take their photographs so I’m not going to bloody well start now. I’ll be bringing my camera along tomorrow too.

UPDATE 1: So, this morning I went to the “Meet the Manager” event at Victoria station. I almost didn’t make it though. A conspiracy of fools almost made sure I missed the whole thing completely.

Allow me to explain. I arrived at Viccy station a tad late so to save some time I made my way over to the Information desk with the aim of finding out exactly where the event was taking place. After asking the young lass behind the counter I was told the following:

The Meet the Manager event was yesterday. After insisting it was today they agreed.

The Meet the Manager Event is at London Bridge After insisting it wasn’t and the website stated it was today and at Viccy station, they sent someone to check the details. They came back and insisted the event was at London Bridge, and even the website said so.

Not very impressed I decided I’d go outside to have a smoke and ring the long suffering other half to check that I wasn’t going mad. After her ladyship confirmed it still stated the meeting was at Viccy Station I decided that I’d wander around a bit to see if I could find the meeting.

I finally stumbled upon it, and looked for the most formally dressed manager. I explained the situation and about half way through he stopped me and pointe me towards the company’s Revenue and Enforcement Manager. Jackpot!

I approached the manager and informed them I was going to ask a two part question:

Are your staff authorised to insist on a customer deleting pictures? Almost instantaneously came the answer of….. No

I explained I was going to put that answer on record and proceeded in asking: If a customer refuses to delete the pictures are your staff authorised to remove the customer from the train and then detain them until the BTP arrive? Again the answer was in the negative.

She then asked me to relate the story. It was very evident that she had not heard of the incident at all, which indicates their customer services dept are either telling porky pies, or are just bloody incompotent. I then explained the responses I’ve had from customer services and that I was not happy with the fact I couldn’t re-contact them to say I was not happy with the outcome. The manager has kindly given me her direct email address and has assured me she will be investigating the incident.

So, the two plastic plod, who tried intimidating me into giving up one of my civil liberties, you now have an internal investigation and a police investigation pending. Have a nice week!

I’ve also just given an interview to a media outlet and as soon as it’s published I’ll pop the link here.

Just for good measure: