Julian Drury
track railway, and in the busiest hour of the morning we’re running 20 trains an hour, which means we’re at maximum capacity because it’s a three minute gap in the signalling system. So we have to run the whole railway like a production line, or conveyor belt as we sometimes call it, and there’s no leeway for any mistakes. If one small thing goes wrong, everything stops. So it’s actually very demanding to operate.’ The results show however that
they’ve pretty much got that licked, so I wondered if others come to c2c for advice. ‘We’ve had a lot of exchange visits with colleagues from other railways and we’re part of the Japan Exchange Programme, which a lot of the UK operators take part in. We’re very committed to it and in fact our engineering director has just come back having learnt a lot of lessons as to how the Central Japan Railway Company runs its Tokaido Shinkansen bullet train service. They certainly have things to teach us despite our success, chief among them thoroughness, the importance of planning and following your plan through, as well as detail. It sounds very boring to say that detail is behind it, but in a way boring is good because if you get it right it puts you in a different place.’ Drury admits he didn’t set out thinking along those lines. ‘I can honestly say that I’ve been associated with c2c and its predecessors in previous jobs, indeed I only took over four and a half years ago, but I know that we didn’t used to have the same methodical, detailed, careful approach. It’s something we’ve gradually learned over time.’
Letting the customer take the lead My tour of the c2c line days before the interview included the swanky Thorp Bay station, which after a £500,000 facelift is the company’s first ‘smart station’ and aims to ‘break down barriers’ between customers and staff. It’s obvious that there must be some sophisticated marketing behind all this. ‘We’re very keen to learn from our customers,’ says Drury. ‘We follow the sort of things they do, their interests, the way they think, and we ask them how they would like us to change the way we do things, so we are continually re-inventing ourselves.
‘So far they’ve told us they want ticket buying to
be a simpler and more comprehensible process; they want staff to be more approachable; an easier transit through the station and a high standard of facilities. Thorpe Bay is the embodiment of our research findings on customers in that area, who tend to be techno-savvy workers in either the City or Canary Wharf. They’re very switched on people who know what they want and are capable of making their own choices but what they want is for the complexity to be removed.’
Drury is animated when telling me that the
company has become addicted to Twitter over the past year and half and now has 9,500 followers. ‘Twitter
- and this would surprise people if they knew it - has changed the way we manage the business. It’s moved us from being quite traditional in the way we respond, maybe taking weeks or months, to one that tries to respond while the customer is experiencing something, so we’ve shortened our timescales right up! We’ve got miles and miles to go but we’re moving towards letting our customers educate us rather than us telling them
what they can do.’
Thinking smart for the future That’s an objective being set for the future, which leads to the question of how Drury wants c2c to evolve if it keeps the franchise. ‘We’re still very ambitious, which might sound strange but we are. We took on the EFQM model (European Foundation for Quality Management) system last year and one of the concepts is that you set long- term objectives for the business rather than shorter-term ones such as who owns it. So having the possible opportunity of continuing to run c2c is good because it kind of fits in with the model that we’re already operating. The things we’d like to do are around developing the sort of customer
About c2c
• Owning company is National Express Group • Serving 26 stations, primarily a London commuter route operating services on the London, Tilbury and Southend-on-Sea railway line from London Fenchurch Street to East London, and along the Northern Thames Gateway area of southern Essex, including Basildon, Chafford Hundred, Tilbury and Southend-on-Sea.
• The main route from Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness via Basildon is 39.5 miles.
• The line has a speed limit of 75 mph (121 km), although the Class 357 Electrostar trains are capable of 100 mph (160 km)
• Thorpe Bay is c2c’s first ‘smart’ station and the refurbishment included: A significantly improved ticket hall, with an open counter New information screens and video screens for customers, including a dedicated board shaped like a smartphone - the first of its kind in the country - displaying travel information on London Underground services
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