Audit & Assessment
Service Quality Audits
Where passenger rail services are franchised or concessioned, governments need to ensure that the service specified is actually being delivered. Although punctuality and cancellations hit the headlines, it is also important that other standards are achieved, for instance in cleanliness, the provision of facilities at stations, and the responses of staff to customer questions.
Since 2020, the British Government has required train operators to have such Service Quality regimes in place, with market research companies ‘mystery shopping’ both station and train facilities and staff, and IT providers enabling the management and reporting of the data collected. For commercial operators, the results of this directly impact the amount of money received from central Government. To ensure that the system is working properly, audits of this process are appropriate, and RCL has undertaken audits of 7 of Britain’s franchised operators.
However, this is not just about checking the numbers (although our understanding of sampling, data collection and statistics is important, in putting the resulting outputs and changes in them into perspective). We believe that an important part of this role is working with train operators, to encourage good performance, share best practice and suggest improvements to the SQ process. This might include ensuring that:
- apps which surveyors use to record train defects are linked to detailed internal plans of carriages, so that maintenance staff can easily find the problems identified, for rectification;
- good feedback from mystery shoppers about staff interactions reaches the staff involved, and not just any poor feedback;
- stations are re-mapped periodically, so that any new or moved assets are actually shown properly;
- a TOC's entire network is covered, over the course of a yearly station visits are appropriately weighted to reflect the number of passengers involved;
- permitting a small proportion of assets to fail where there are many such assets (e.g. car-park spaces), providing that passenger needs are satisfied, in order not to penalise TOCs for the near-impossibility of achieving 100%;
- the application of sacrificial protective film to surfaces subject to graffiti;
- other adjacent properties owned by others (e.g. Network Rail) are also included in some form of quality assessment, to provide consistency within the station environment.
No graffiti here any more
Customer Information Screens need to work
…as (perhaps more importantly) so do Help Points
Last updated: Friday, 12th July 2024
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