My family was booked on Eurostar on that Saturday for a short weekend break to EuroDisney, that day four Eurostar trains broke down in the tunnel. Luckily (compared to many others) we were just getting the kids’ breakfast and finishing packing when we first heard of the unfolding travel problems – at least we weren’t trapped in traffic, at a terminal somewhere in Kent, or worse. After the initial disappointment, we started the horrible process of trying to get confirmation that our trip really wasn’t going ahead.
My personal experience of Eurostar’s handling of the situation can basically be summarised as frustration with lack of information from Eurostar. We were left to speculate – should we wait and see if they will run the Disney train later that day, perhaps they will put us on a train on Sunday? Who decides what is meant by “essential”, can we just assume our trip is definitely cancelled? No good phoning the call centre though because all we could get was
“Sorry, this service is currently unavailable.”
Not really helpful… BTW, if you call before 9AM you hear a jolly message that the office is closed but they are open at 9AM. A tailored message could have answered many customers’ queries and helped to reduce the inbound call queues.
Watching the news and following the blogosphere it seems everyone faced the same problem, whether trying to find out information via the internet or in-person stranded at a Eurostar terminal: CUSTOMERS WANT INFORMATION (and reliable information at that).
Eurostar could have had TV and radio news working for them, instead of just letting the BBC/Sky/et al run round highlighting victims’ personal stories. It was only at 3PM on the Saturday that the Eurostar website was updated to state categorically no trains would be running that day, and that was all it said. All the update achieved was raise more questions.
For Eurostar, they have plenty of issues to examine – what, who, how, why, why, why… From the reports so far it looks like their own internal communications broke down on more than one level (being unable to communicate inside the tunnels sounds like a major problem in itself) so quite how they could expect to get information to the tens of thousands of customers expecting to travel over the busy holiday period no-one can answer until Eurostar know the answers themselves.
While Eurostar’s disaster is a high profile, major problem affecting so many customers in one incident the lessons learned can be applied to the individual issues/enquiries/cases that face all customer services staff everyday. Sometimes the problem can’t be fixed quickly or easily, and that’s when good communication is essential.
