In Which National Express East Coast Are Smashing

Warning: the following tale contains unsolicited, forthright praise for a large corporate public transport operator. Some readers may experience feelings of dizziness. Do not adjust your browser settings, there is nothing wrong with your computer.

Last weekend an opportunistic individual, I know not whom, somehow managed to abstract a number of envelopes from the locked steel postbox that was until recently bolted to a stake outside our front gate. Said envelopes contained various train tickets for a holiday we had just booked, most of which were tied to specific trains and seat reservations, and were therefore useless to anyone other than me or my wife. One set of tickets, however, booked with National Express East Coast, were valid for use on any off-peak train for a month after the initial booking date. At some point on Saturday morning a helpful passerby found our holiday travel documents scattered around about our gate, gathered them up and replaced them in our postbox, all except the £158.80-worth of open returns to London, which I can only presume are now in the possession of some thieving, Royal Mail-molesting northern pissbiscuit.

Upon discovering this state of affairs I may have allowed my normally serene mien to become somewhat discomposed. I might have slammed a few doors, and I may have scared some small children who happened to be passing by in the lane by taking the aforementioned postbox and kicking it across my garden. I do not recall the events precisely, but it can be assumed that I did not comport myself particularly well. I was, to put it mildly, annoyed.

Some time later, when my feelings had subsided to more normal day-to-day levels of rage, I decided to seek restitution, from whomsoever I could obtain it. I started by phoning the customer relations department of the rail operator. Naturally, it being a weekend, they were closed. No-one uses trains on a weekend, of course, so it was entirely unreasonable of me to expect them to be open. After kicking a few walls, I decided that it would probably be best to leave it till Monday and spend the remainder of the weekend fuming and fantasizing about installing motion-activated rail-guns on my gateposts.

On Monday morning, following sage advice from a friend, I registered the theft with the police, and after a few hours I obtained a crime reference number in exchange for my detailed description of events. Armed with this number I then proceeded to call National Express’s customer relations department. Astonishingly, I got through to a human almost instantly. Even more astonishingly, the human in question seemed interested in my complaint, and promised to ascertain what, if anything, they could do for me. At best I expected them to simply cancel the tickets and make a hollow promise to keep an eye out for any suspicious-looking northerners travelling from Yorkshire to London during the entirety of March. Imagine my amazement, then, when a few minutes after I had hung up the phone I was emailed by the nice lady with whom I had just spoken, offering assurances that replacement tickets would be provided for us by web-support upon presentation of a valid crime reference. I was somewhat taken aback, and phoned the provided number fully expecting to be told that it was all a horrible mistake, and how could I possibly expect a mere national train operator to absorb the cost of replacing two entire saver returns? Indeed, the person I got through to at first did state that replacing stolen tickets was not company policy, but I persisted, and invoked the name of the individual originally responsible for raising my shattered hopes and dreams from the depths.

I was put on hold. I hardly dared breathe. In the distance, a bell tolled. My life passed before my eyes. A few minutes of it, anyway, and then the chap picked up the phone again, asked for my crime reference, and told me to go to my local station to collect duplicate tickets. I nearly fell off my chair. In order to salvage what I could from the situation I had originally intended to place a claim with my insurance company, and I was fully braced to pay some ridiculous excess in order to repurchase the heisted tickets at a slightly less ruinous cost to myself. But thanks to the lovely people at National Express East Coast, who I only phoned in a hopeless attempt to stick it to the thieves by cancelling the tickets, I don’t have to do that at all, and, a little time and energy excepted, I’m not even one shiny penny out of pocket.

It should be noted that National Express have only recently taken over the east coast line franchise, and are still finding their feet in the rail-constrained transport format, being more used to dealing with vehicles with rubber tyres. This example of what can only be termed customer service may just be an isolated instance of random competence, down to someone in upper management not yet having beaten every last trace of human feeling out of all of their call-centre minions. On the off-chance that it actually reflects a company policy of treating paying punters like sentient beings, however, I would like to offer my fullest praise and thanks to the new franchise-holders for not being as rubbish as large faceless corporations normally are.

6 comments 2008-02-15 18:22 Categories: Personal, Rage