That’s the way to do it: Eurostar shows us the way

Taking the Train: Big Strain

Nothing spoils a holiday quite as much as a stressful and unpleasant journey.  This year we decided to take the family to South West France for a couple of weeks.  Big mistake.  Getting there and back was so bad it took us a couple of weeks to remember that we had actually had quite a nice time in the middle.  I knew I should complain (my MAC partners were breathing down my neck) but I could hardly bring myself to relive the whole ghastly experience.  Still, I am glad I did.  Whereas I have spent the last month telling anyone who would listen how bad our experience was, I have now become one of Eurostar’s biggest fans.  What do we at MAC always say?  Good complaint handling can turn the grumpiest complainant into the your biggest fan and here I am, unexpectedly singing the praises of Eurostar.

No Relief for Family of Refugees from Ryanair

After a series of nightmarish experiences with Ryanair we decided to go by train this year.  What could be better?  Comfortable, calm check-in just down the road at the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras International, two hours to hop across Paris on the Metro and maybe have a bite to eat and swishing down to the south of France on a highspeed train – tickets and seats all booked through Rail Europe100 days in advance as recommended by our friend the man in seat 61.  And all with only the tiniest contribution to my global footprint.  Or at least that is how it should have been.

Un Complète Cockup

Turning up at St Pancras an hour before departure, we discovered that the 6.25am we were booked onto did not exist and that the first train was leaving 25 minutes later.  I went to collect the tickets from the machine but without success.  In the ticket office the charming staff entered my booking reference and found our booking but soon discovered that the computer would not “release” the tickets.  We would have to wait five minutes.  While everyone else effortlessly collected their tickets I stood waiting, and waiting and waiting.  Check-in opened.  Check-in closed.  An hour after our arrival at the station my anxious mob of six, ranging in age from one to forty four were getting fretful.  The minutes ticked by and with check-in officially closed and the train leaving in fifteen minutes I tried to get someone to talk to me.  They kept telling me it would be ok and that they would give us duplicate tickets if necessary.  To cut a long and stressful story short, we were finally issued with a handwritten duplicate ticket less than ten minutes before departure and had to run through check-in and security only just reaching the train in time.  At Paris, the change of train time having reduced our time to cross Paris by half an hour, I had to spend another twenty minutes waiting for them to laboriously print out the pack of cards that represented return tickets to Agen for seven people and for the nice French lady in the severe suit to find her post-it pad and write an immaculately transcribed note to the train guard in case we missed our connection.  This left us with about forty minutes to cross Paris.  Never had an underground system so many stairs (and so few escalators).   We made it – but only just.

Our return journey ought to have been less stressful but it wasn’t.  Our beautiful SNCF train – the symbol of how much better they do it in France – was held up for two hours owing to what the English call a “person on the line” but which the French appear to refer to more discreetly as “un incident”.  As it gradually became apparent that we were not going to catch the last train from Paris to London I rang Eurostar only to be told that as our tickets were non-refundable and non-exchangeable they would not be honoured on a later train and we would have to buy new tickets at £200 a go.  With our now expanded party of 9, that would have meant a cool £1800 on the credit card.  I decided to wait.  When I rang again an hour later I was told that our tickets would after all be honoured on the next available train.

Is this a record?

But here is the real point of my tale.  A couple of weeks after my return I plucked up the energy to email my complaint to Eurostar asking for an explanation, an apology and some compensation.  Within six hours I had received a full reply, a reply which for those familiar with the MAC mantra on complaint handling could almost be seen as a model of how to do it.  Here are some edited highlights:

Apologies, empathy and explanation

I am sorry to learn of the difficulties that you all experienced in collecting you tickets and the advice you appear to have been given by telephone. I can fully understand the stress and inconvenience, as well as the disappointment that this caused you all. Having to rush through stations and on the underground is far from ideal and I realise that this was far from your expectations.

Having explained in detail what he found when he investigated the complaint and how the booking had somehow become corrupted, the writer goes on to say:

This is an extremely rare error to encounter, and has not been experienced by anyone at the ticket office or the helpdesk that I have spoken to. Therefore, this is being treated very seriously and will be investigated fully in order to determine the cause of the problem. I cannot say when this will be concluded but I can assure you that it will ensure this issue does not arise again in the future.

Further apology and offer of compensation

In light of the ticketing problems, I would like to offer you a gesture (of) my concern for your experience and of goodwill, which I hope will assure you of our intentions. Therefore, please accept my personal apologies and if you can supply your address, I would like to send you each a Eurostar journey voucher, which will entitle you each to a free single leg journey or a 50% discount on a return trip. They are fully transferable and valid for one year.

Happy customer – returning customer

So here I am with a prompt, detailed and polite response to my email, a sense that others will probably not have to suffer as we did, a recognition of our emotions and their validity and a very decent level of compensation.  I copied my email to Rail Europe through whom we booked the tickets and they too have now admitted that they had made an errror somewhere along the way which had helped to confuse the Eurostar computer and they have offered me an additional £50 voucher.  For a moment I had toyed with returning to Ryanair, but given they don’t even have a complaints department, I will be sticking with Eurostar (at least for as long as it takes us to use up all those vouchers).

All aboard?

Now, if Eurostar can do it why can’t the public sector?  Why do the NHS, schools, local authorities and all those other public bodies find it so hard to empathise with their customers and handle their complaints properly so that complainants get what they want: to know they have been listened too, to know that someone cares about their bad experience, to know that something will be done and to know that maybe, as a result, the same bad things won’t happen to them again or to others?

Coming soon – what happens when you complain about your butter? Meanwhile, take a look at the MAC credo on complaint handling and how we can help on our website

July Newsletter: New Look, Same Passions

Our passions remains the same but we have clothed our mix of news and views in new clothes knitted together with Wordpress which Dan Wardle of Surveylab our adviser in these matters assures us will bring the blog into the world of Web 2.0.

On www.publicinvolvement.org.uk recently…

A MP has asked why we are all so miserable? Are we becoming a nation of miserabilists never happier than when whingeing? We take a look at the latest Annual Report from the Financial Services Ombudsman for some facts and figures on the nation’s complaint behaviour in the markets he covers. The principle of being fair to consumers is all the rage in regulatory circles and we look at the new laws banning unfair practices backed by new OFT research that tells us that ‘consumer detriment’ costs us as consumers over £6billion pounds a year. We join up our learning on complaints with our thinking on user engagement and ask – are they linked?. Can the complainant become the engaged user for the longer term?

Finally just to keep give you a chance to tell us your experience, there is a mini-survey for parents of school age children to complete about what they did when they had a problem with the children’s school.

Have a good summer.

The Miserabilist Contribution to Happiness

The New Miserabilism?
Complaints and the people who make them are often seen as confirmation of the new miserabilism – a condition that led an outburst from Tom Harris MP asking why everyone is so bloody miserable in a world where in the UK at least, we have a lot to be grateful for. A new book on complaining behaviour by Julian Baggini “The Complaint Book” (www.thecomplaintbook.com) mentions a sub-set of chronic complainants labelled by a psychologist as “help rejecting” people who prefer moaning to being given a solution. The Victor Meldrew persona certainly hit that vein.

The Ombuds View
What does the Financial Ombudsman say about all this in his latest latest Annual Report? There were two areas where numbers of complaints rose very sharply – complaints about current accounts which saw a five-fold increase and those about payment protection insurance up from 1832 in the year ending March 2007 to 10,652 by March 2008. These are both interesting example of how complaint volumes can now be driven by media and internet campaigners – chief amongst them Martin Lewis whose site moneysavingexpert.com leads on these two areas of consumer problems suggesting templates for letters and other encouragements to complain against these practices.

Hire your own complaint handler?
Another phenomenon identified by the FOS is the rise in the commercial complaint handler. In almost one in five cases referred to the Ombudsman service, consumers used the services of such a company. This is strange – after all the service is free to use. However it may be because the consumer believes that the product is too complex to understand let alone complain about – the Ombudsman specifically mentions pension and SERP-related cases where the complaint handler makes unrealistic promises about the money that they can get for the consumer with a problem.

The New Community Agenda
The FOS has set up an Access working party. The Board had asked Lord Hunt of Wirral to look at access and transparency issues in particular and now the service is looking at implementation. Walter Merricks is now looking at what he calls a more active community agenda – awareness-raising with outreach programmes. He is already claiming some success with more under 35s and more women complaining diluting the historic profile of the Ombuds-user as the retired male with a duff pension, time on his hands and a new skill in word processing.

The Heavy Mob
As Walter gets interested in the ’soft’ skills of awareness raising etc, the OFT and BERR are looking at the role of the enforcers and how that sits with the new emphasis on principle-based law. 23 laws have been repealed and now as of end May this year we have The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations which implement the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. 31 specific trading practices – my favourite is the one that bans the ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing. See all 31 practices here (links to PDF file at OFT).

As part of this new approach, principled but pragmatic, the Office of Fair Trading and the Department for Business, Entreprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) are looking to use the improved complaint data that they are getting from sources such as Consumer Direct to direct the searchlight towards those areas of the greatest consumer detriment. The OFT has recently published some more work in this area in April 2008. The amount of consumer detriment was estimated at £6.6 billion.

Remember “Jewels to be Treasured”?
So the miserable complainer is getting taken very seriously indeed. Long ago in another political area/ universe, the then Secretary of State for Health Virginia Bottomley characterised complaints – and by extension we suppose those who make them – as “jewels to be treasured”. A leap across time to the present brings us back to the health service and our current pre-occupation with health and social care services user involvement and engagement.

Complaining and Engaging
After all the complainant is someone who has made the choice to become engaged to pursue an individual goal – apology, correction, compensation. That initial individual impetus to action can cross-over into the more sustained and collective experience of engagement. We have noticed that many of those who come forward for patient forums and liaison groups have had an experience of health provision which has made a deep impression on them. The experience of complaining can act as the recruiting sergeant for patient engagement – the challenge of that is a double one. We have to understand how to convert what is often a negative into a positive directed towards improvement for all rather than vengeance on the few associated with the initial failure and we must make the experience of joining a patient body such as the LINks one that sustains commitment over the longer term.

Dare to Discuss Being Happy
My thought is that we have to turn to the work highlighted at the recent summer party held by the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute. Yes of course it rained but the topic was a daring one – Happiness. The research shows that happiness once a reasonable level of material comfort has been reached comes from elements in our lives associated like getting married, being a member of a faith group and attending services regularly, using some extra leisure to spend time with family and friends and staying healthy. This last attribute will help you get beyond the trough of the middle years – the slough of despond linked in particular with having teenagers sharing the family home. Once they have gone, the happiness line slants upward only interrupted by the death of a spouse.

Can we add to the list – membership of a LINk?
Or perhaps participating in a quick survey?

The Hunt Review of the Financial Ombudsman Service – Opening Up, Reaching Out and Aiming High

The title has a bit of the ring of a rock anthem about it, don’t you think? Up, Up and Away by the 5th Dimension? Or perhaps one of these inspirational business books that promise to get you out of that career rut. A big hallo then for the review of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) by the Rt Hon Lord Hunt of Wirral MBE available at http://www.thehuntreview.org.uk/

I took a look at what Lord Hunt (LH) identified as “the most contentious and difficult issue for this Review“. It got a chapter of its own called “Transparency – Performance Data”. The consumer bodies wanted lots of information with poorly performing companies ‘named and shamed’. The companies resisted it for various fairly predictable reasons – one of which was that “consumers would not understand the information and might be misled by it.” So easily confused they are – poor things. So consumer orgs for and companies against. LH said he was disappointed by this polarised response but he could hardly have been surprised.

In the event he went on to conclude that information on complaint performance is relevant and that there was “no legitimate justification for withholding it as a matter of principle.” The FOS already publishes an anonymised benchmarking table showing the top 11 financial groups. What is surprising is not that the worse performing companies want to keep their performance under wraps but that, according to Walter Merricks, the chief Ombudsman, “the best firm (does not) seem to want to promote its performance positively“.

Hunt suggests a mix of carrot – an Award for exceptional improvement in complaint handling – and stick – the Worst Performer identified in each of the markets the FOS covers by reference to the rate of upheld complaints. Much remains to be decided and the negotiations will go on for a while I would guess. Hunt concludes by saying he finds “openness both desirable and inevitable“. Amen to that.

All this manoeuvring brings to mind how the public sector has addressed the challenge of openness. Public sector performance in this area is a model of openness. If you look at the reports of the Healthcare Commission and the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, you will find the parties listed and named.

Case No. E.1947/02- 03 Discharge Procedures
Poor transfer arrangements and nursing care
Complaint against BUPA Care Homes and Bexley Bromley and South East London Strategic Health authority, formerly Greenwich Health Authority
Summary of Case
etc. – this is from an old Ombudsman Case – we will await the revised format of cases promised for any day now.

The Healthcare Commission also names the organisations involved in the complaints it deals with – a job it is giving up in April 2009. Escalated complaints go straight to the Ombudsman after that.

So perhaps in preparation, Anne Abraham’s office is doing a consultation on principles of complaint handling – get your comments in by 12th August even if they are covered with sand stuck on with Factor 50. Great reading for the beach.

Read more about how M-A-C approaches complaint handling and our account of complaint handling at a London hospital.

When Citizens Complain – what should happen?

The Public Administration Select Committee are in the news for advocating a single entry point for public services complaints.

Para 42. “We agree with Sir David Varney and the National Audit Office that the Government should explore the scope for a common access point nationwide for all non-emergency public services. This would provide a single point of contact for impartial information on where to make a complaint or seek redress. We restate our predecessor Committee’s recommendation in favour of just such a service-’Public Services Direct’-which would offer an easy access, one-stop-shop approach to a complex web of public services. Public Services Direct should be both a gateway to government organisations and services, and a source of basic advice to public service users. It would act as the starting point for people unsure of how or where to lodge their initial complaint, and would provide them with the appropriate information and guidance.” When Citizens Complain, Fifth Report

In the terms we use about complaint handling, the above is a referral site. What the public want is a problem-resolution site. Most people build complaint handling processes offering an initial point of contact and then a second one if the problem does not get sorted there. Where the complainant wants to see Houses of Correction, the public service build great Palaces of Escalation. For resolution, read referral.

The committee quotes this example:

“…for agencies of the Department for Work and Pensions complaints are dealt with initially by staff at local level. Complainants can then escalate a complaint to line management as necessary. If they are still unsatisfied they can raise the case directly with the Business Chief Executive, and then appeal to the Independent Case Examiner.57 Finally, the Ombudsman can consider the case if it is referred to her by a Member of Parliament.”

The big growth in the public services is in the intermediate complaint handling organisations:

“There are also an increasing number of independent, or quasi-independent, complaint review bodies to which complainants can turn before raising matters with the Ombudsman. These intermediate or second-tier complaint handlers exist particularly where the Ombudsman receives a large number of complaints about an organisation. They include:

• The Adjudicator’s Office, which investigates complaints about HMRC, the Valuation Office Agency, the Public Guardianship Office and the Insolvency Service.
• The Healthcare Commission, which at present is responsible for reviewing complaints about the National Health Service (NHS) or independent healthcare services that have not been resolved at local level. From April 2009, however, the Healthcare Commission will no longer have a role in complaints handling, as complaints processes for health and social care will be brought together and the system streamlined to emphasise local resolution of complaints.
• The Independent Case Examiner, who reviews complaints about DWP bodies including the Child Support Agency, the Pension Service and Jobcentre Plus.
• The Independent Complaints Reviewer, who investigates complaints about a range of organisations including the Audit Commission, the Charity Commission, the Housing Corporation, the National Archives and the Land Registry.”

These organisations are sort of junior organisationally specific Ombudsoffices but without the clout or the power of being the last stop.

The committee’s suggestion for a one stop shop will merely add another layer to an already complex and expensive system that institutionalises delay, decreases satisfaction and increases escalation. Hooray for the Health Service that has abolished the middle layer.

Also people at entry points for complex multi-organisational or multi-cause complaints systems while often recruited from the ranks of the beginners, the juniors and the newly-joined have to be the best qualified people in the whole system. They must have extraordinary gifts of diagnosis, have access to completely up-to-date knowledge about who does what together with telephone numbers for named individuals and be possessed of extra-ordinary personal attributes of empathy, listening skills and clarity of expression.

Do you think ‘Public Service Direct’ could deliver that? How many years would pass as everyone from departments sat round tables evolving protocols, manuals, interrogative algorithms, contact detail updating processes? There would of course be a need for an independent complaint handler for complaints about Public Service Direct. Decades would drift by. NHS Direct anyone?

What surprised me finally was not to see NACAB’s name listed amongst those supplying evidence. They are at last trying to grapple with the complexities of how best to concentrate and manage resources to advise people on the whole range of public services and products. Give them £10 or £20 Million for 7 years and tell them to set up the front door – they seem to be well down that path already. See http://www.nacab.org.uk/ and their change programme:

Year one (2005/06)
In the first year, we had a good look at what we were already doing, produced an award-winning film showing what we might look like in the future and completed a number of key initiatives:

• designing a new approach to service delivery
• piloting an out of hours, telephone, email and chat service
• setting up three centres to pilot the new approach to service delivery
• developing a set of national referral protocols
• commissioning the production of a new advice kiosk

Year two (2006/07)
Having successfully completed year one we are now moving forward by:

• establishing a single national telephone advice number
• setting up a national email advice service
• improving access to web based information and services
• introducing the new approach to service delivery
• considering how interactive (chat room style) advice can best be used
• forging productive partnerships with other agencies and advice providers

And it goes on.

It is not a question of avoiding re-inventing the wheel – more a question of not adding yet another redundant wheel when we already have all the wheels we need to propel this particular vehicle thank you.

Read more about M-A-C’s complaint handling consulting, and download templates for reviewing and implementing better complaint handling at www.mooreadamsoncraig.co.uk