Behind the scenes at Northern’s Customer Contact Centre

Tuesday 14th October 2025

Knowing the frustrations I’ve experienced claiming Delay Repay over the years with Avanti West Coast and GWR, when I met up with Alex Hornby during the summer he kindly offered a visit to see Northern’s Customer Contact Centre in Sheffield which deals with Delay Repay.

As you can imagine, I jumped at the opportunity to go behind the scenes at a Train Company contact centre and try and understand how the many and varied contacts, complaints and feedback received from passengers are dealt with.

And so I met up with Northern’s John Smith who is the Operations Manager for the company’s Contact Centre last Wednesday and enjoyed a fascinating insight into what’s involved at a company carrying 100 million passenger journeys a year.

John oversees a team of 66 (full time equivalent) staff who handle around 770,000 interactions with passengers in an average year.

The Contact Centre is located in the depths of Sheffield’s Transport Interchange behind a grey door alongside the Company’s Training Academy.

It’s staffed seven days a week from 06:00 to 23:00 with calls received outside of that time going to the company’s control room.

Around 65% of contacts come in by phone and impressively during the period I visited a screen was confirming no calls waiting to be answered although John was the first to admit this can vary depending on the performance out on the tracks.

For example, only the previous afternoon, as the peak period was approaching a train conductor was sadly assaulted by a passenger on a train at Meadowhall station which meant the line to Doncaster and north became blocked for some time leading to an inevitable spike in contacts received from passengers.

Of the remaining 35% of contacts most are via email or Northern’s web based contact form but increasingly passengers are using the live web chat facility which John explained can mean his staff can handle up to three such contacts at the same time, if needed, by using three different screens.

Staff in the Centre multi task between handling phone calls as well as contacts received electronically during their shifts and, of course, although only small in number these days, letters are also received through the mail to the Company’s Freepost address which are read and responded to by the team.

The team also answer enquiries and questions that come from passengers pressing Help Points at Northern’s 476 stations across its network and also deal with any ‘call for help’ buttons pressed on lifts at its stations.

A more recent facility is the installation of accessible toilet pods at certain stations which can be accessed by passengers with a RADAR key or scanning their ticket, if it has a QR code, or if not, by passengers pressing a button which triggers a video image of the passenger waiting to enter coming up on a screen at one of the contact centre desks from where the team member can release the door to open.

Another member of the team oversees the issue of scholars season tickets on smart cards, in response to parents and students buying them online on Northern’s website as well as also dealing with group bookings.

But, it was the way Delay Repay is handled that piqued my interest. What I was particularly pleased to see was Delay Repay is totally integrated into Northern’s customer contact handling operation.

Indeed, I saw the same staff handling phone contacts and emails and in between also attending to Delay Repay claims. There was none of this ridiculous situation I’ve encountered a few times through First’s Contact Centre (which deals with Avanti and GWR among others) where the staff dealing with Delay Repay are not allowed to talk to passengers and the staff who talk to passengers are not able to deal with Delay Repay decisions leading to a Kafkaesque style dissatisfaction for passengers already aggrieved at being delayed.

John assessed 80% of Northern’s Delay Repay claims are submitted online with the remainder submitted using a paper form.

The software used by Northern – as well as a number of other Train Companies – will automatically deal with the claim if the information submitted is correct and straight forward. This will include paying any reimbursement into a bank account or back to a credit card.

Manual intervention is required for repayment through slower means such as Rail Travel Vouchers or Cashable Vouchers which Northern also offers.

Of the 221,000 claims received so far since Period 1 in the rail industry year Northern’s software has accepted 157,000 with 75% of these being deal with automatically and reimbursements initiated within 72 hours.

The average length of time to deal with claims including those with manual intervention to resolve queries is seven days, although John did admit some can take longer.

In Northern’s case the follow up to a claim the automated system throws up as needing manual intervention is done by the Contact Centre team reaching out to the passenger. What annoys me about the Avanti/GWR system is the passenger receives an automated generated email advising the claim has been unsuccessful whereas what actually is the case is the automated system has been unable to deal with the claim.

John explained the importance of passengers submitting the correct information to ensure a quick resolution. Often passengers submit incorrect times, invalid tickets or claim for a delay that didn’t exist or submit their claim to the wrong Train Company.

For multi leg journeys, John confirmed the initial Train Company causing the delay is the one responsible for meeting the claim even if a further (and more serious) delay is experienced on a subsequent leg with a different Company.

However, he gave the example of a Northern train arriving into Preston 15 minutes late but still made a delayed connection with an Avanti train as that was running 20 minutes late then the claim would be with Avanti as Northern had got the passenger to Preston in time for the connection and therefore the delay to the Northern service had no impact to the customer’s journey as the Avanti service was running late.

Had that original Avanti train ran to time and the passenger had consequently had to wait an hour for the next scheduled Avanti train which in turn had got delayed later in the journey for another hour resulting in a two hour late arrival then Northern would be the company responsible for the full reimbursement of the ticket, including in this case the price of a return ticket if that was involved.

Which, as a side note is yet another cop out by LNER now it only sells single tickets. Previously a passenger experiencing a two hour delay on a journey from say King’s Cross to Newcastle and held a return ticket would receive a full refund for the cost of the return ticket even if there’d been no issues on the outward (for example) journey. Now, you only receive the reimbursement for a single as that’s all you can buy.

Furthermore although LNER’s software throws up the actual delay encountered from its database of journey times the Company is an outlier in only offering Delay Repay for a minimum of 30 minutes rather than 15.

Each ticket submitted with a claim is checked against industry held records. It’s interesting that the five digit serial number passengers have to submit on old style orange coloured tickets may well be duplicated in the system. John explained that when the destination and origin is added as part of the data for the ticket then it will be a unique ticket.

It was encouraging to hear John explain the online form Northern uses for passengers to submit claims is kept under review with some aspects currently being looked at including the question that asks “are you claiming for more than one ticket” which can be ambiguous as to whether it refers to passengers who are using split tickets for a through journey (they need to submit all such tickets) or two passengers travelling together on the same delayed journey. Making this more clear will help increase the number of claims dealt with automatically.

As with general contact handling, John explained Delay Repay claims can spike in number in response to any significant operational issues on the railway. A period of serious delays into and out of Leeds, for example, can see an instant increase in claims coming in. These are held as pending for the first 24 hours as the data used by the software has to be manually authenticated as well as attribution determined for the cause of the delay/s. For example, John explained in the case of the incident at Meadowhall quoted earlier, the system wouldn’t know the train involved ran out of service towards Doncaster as it would have been recorded as calling at the subsequent stations, but that information would be corrected overnight so claims made are dealt with using accurate data.

John showed me the reason why Train Companies prefer passengers to go for the more direct means of reimbursement into bank accounts. That process is automated whereas my personal preferred option of a Rail Travel Voucher involves manual intervention with a staff member in the contact centre inserting an A4 sheet of four preprinted, but blank value, vouchers into a printer and then getting the details printed out including a barcode as well as a letter to accompany it then placed in an envelope which then has to be franked and put in the post.

I know LNER (yet again) has unilaterally withdrawn this facility but from my own personal perspective I much prefer this system, labour intensive it obviously is, as it gives me satisfaction to make long journeys and opt to have money off the fare paid when I choose including using the sums reimbursed towards the occasional 7-day All Line Rail Rover.

My grateful thanks to John for sparing the time to explain all this as well as to his team who I could see were doing a great job at effectively and empathetically dealing with the myriad of contacts coming in.

Many of these arrangements will no doubt be up for review as GBR becomes a thing and in that process I sincerely hope existing best practice where it’s available will be the exemplar for the future. John’s team at Northern will be a good place to start.

Roger French

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