I'm sick to death of how NXEC fail to comunicate with us passengers. Like thousands of other people I was heavily delayed last Thursday thanks to the Power line coming down between Stevenage and KX. Accepted, from NXEC's point of view they couldn't do anything about it other than wait for the lines to be fixed and look after their passengers. Sadly but not unusually, they failed miserably on the latter.
I would go as far to say that the information NXEC gave out last Thursday and on previous occasions when the lines are down, is worse than the info GNER used to release in similar circumstances. What you get when the TOC's fail to regularly update customers are thousands of commuters running round trying to work out what to do next. Honestly it's farcical. I've got to the point where I don't try and second guess to get home at a reasonable time. Oh no. These days I just run to a nice pub across the road and don't return to KX until gone 9pm by which time, things are a lot quieter and the lines are usually back up.
Here's another example of how poor NXEC's communication is. Whenever they fail to put the seat reservations out or when the 'LOOSE' a coach, NXEC know the minute it leaves to starting station that there is a problem with that service. Perhaps NXEC do call or send an email to every station that service is due to stop at between the starting point and the end destination to tell them what the problem is. But do they tell us while we're stood on the platform waiting for the damn thing? Nope. Twice this week the 07.17 has arrived with coach C missing, once with coach D missing and once with no seat reservations. 3 times passenegers have boarded not knowing where the hell their seat is and 3 times we have boarded into chaos. All it would take to avoid this situation is a short 'We are sorry to announce there will be no coach C on the 07.17 to KX. Passengers with seat reservations for coach C will find them in coach D', etc, etc. Clearly this is far to much trouble and clearly NXEC think this is far too much information for our tiny brains to cope with at 07.15am.
In the 8 months since NXEC took control of the ECML, I have to say service has gone down hill. Delays are up, customer satisfaction is down, prices are up above inflation, season ticket benefits are non existant. This is back up by the result of the recent Passenger focus customer satisfaction survey which you can find here http://www.passengerfocus.org.uk/news-and-publications/press-release.asp?dsid=1761. Of the 30 catagories, customers are happier in 3 of them, feel 4 are no better or worse than last year meaning NXEC are worse in 23. I could go on but I think you get the picture.