Enquiring After Enquiries

I'm sure we all have stories about the frustrations of phoning call centres in the Indian Subcontinent. My own story involves National Rail Enquiries and a call handler called "George" (yeah, right!) who insisted that there was no such place as Birmingham.


At one time, before the portable ticket machines were capable of doing everything bar tieing our shoelaces, we had to carry those 1000+ page timetables that trainspotters have with us at all times. If a passenger asked for a train time, then it was a laborious job to work it out particularly if there were changes involved. If you had no sense of Britain's geography then you were floundering!


I noticed that one of my colleagues seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of train departure times out of Preston. When I asked him, he admitted to just making times up - the passenger and he would never cross paths again, so why bother telling the truth? I'm sure he wasn't the only one!


When we got issued with mobile phones, we discovered that it was a lot easier to phone National Rail Enquiries for the train times than it was to go squint-eyed flicking through 1000+ pages of fine print timetables. I'm pretty sure a high percentage of their call volume came from railway staff who were already on trains, trying to answer passenger queries. And then they moved the call centre to India. I stopped using them, my colleagues stopped using them, and the public used to tell me tales of woe about trying to use them.


With the rise of smartphones, there's no urgent need to call them anymore. Apps or their website do as good a job, without the frustration of trying to make a computer understand you. Or you can ask a question on twitter to the specific company you're travelling with. Or indeed, the Guard on the train can now inform you within seconds that your journey will involve five changes and a replacement bus service.


Which begs the question, what is the National Rail Enquiries call centre for? I can't be the only one asking. The new National Rail Trends Yearbook for 2010/11 is now out, and shows that phone calls to NRE are down a whopping great 29%. In fact, this chart shows the overall decline in the last 12 years:


Incidentally, the yearbook also shows that for 2010/11, there was a 7.6% increase in passengers, a 7.1% increase in revenue, and a 6.0% increase in fare prices. I'll write more on this tomorrow.