Virgin trains - How to destroy a brand and a great lesson for us in customer services. Committed to the use of public transport we have over the last five years extensively used the train network in the UK and France, however recently we have decided to stop using Virgin trains as the service has become so bad it is now unworkable. Whilst I am sure it all looks fine on paper with a large percentage of trains arriving on time and the profits rolling in. In other areas such as customer satisfaction and in our opinion customer safety they are sadly lacking.

I should imaging in years to come virgin trains will be held as one of those examples they use in business schools to show how easy it is to destroy the good name of a brand.

Virgin Trains leaving London Euston are normally packed, indeed its interesting to watch the scramble of people who rush to board once the trains platform is announced. I have no doubt that adding an additional carriages to the busy trains or even extra trains to the schedule is an option, however as most people have at this stage already paid for a return ticket these options are not acceptable to virgin as they would simply eat into virgin trains profits.

Many of the trains leaving London are largely over crowded, apart from the fact that customers have in the main paid a not inconsiderable amount of money for a ticket for a journey that might last a couple of hours or more. The safety aspect of passages should also be taken into account, on a recent trip the train was so full of people standing that the trains staff found it impossible to open the shop for almost an hour whilst the staff struggled due the shear number of people standing in the shop area and throughout the train, this simply cannot be safe in the event of the train derailing or coming to a sudden holt. This undoubtedly caused a panic with the trains staff not because of safety grounds but the simple fact that no shop means less profits. However the position seem to be recovered as within 15 mins of the shop opening had simply run out of small change due to the volume of business, this I have no doubt was brought about by the excessive use of the heating system in the train producing a hot dry uncomfortable environment which is ideal if you own a shop selling cold drinks.

Our substantial investment in traveling with virgin trains over the last five years has produced some interesting memories such as the day a busy weekend train was cancelled and the customers of that train were told to use the next train and just to help matters along they cancelled the reservation system resulting in some very angry people just to add to the customer experience. The only other event that surpasses this is then they allowed people to board a train before switching on the reservation system and then switching it on 10 minutes later again causing a great deal of distress among the passages and staff. We actually complained on this occasion and were told by Barry the train manager that if we did not shut up are day would get a whole lot worse as we would be put off at the next stop. But who can blame the poor guy the stress he must have gone through with all the complaints is enough to drive anyone over the edge.

There can only be one thing worse than being a virgin train customer thats being a virgin train employee, my bet is that it must be worse than being a former British rail employee with all the hassle they must get.

Well at least its a profitable business, we now this because Mr Branson has just decided to give a large amount of the profits away to help the environment. Perhaps using those profits to create a better service to encourage people to use the trains more and would be a far more effective way to help the environment. Although this would not have the same PR impact as simply doing the job you are paid to do.

Its not all bad news its caused us to take a long hard look at the way we treat our own customers and virgin trains for us have set the lower end of the bench mark for customer service. We Know if we ever reach a level service as bad as we have experienced with virgin trains then we are in trouble not to mention the fact we just do not want to treat people as badly as virgin trains do. So if you ever feel GardenAdvice have given you a bad customer experiance then tell us we might be as bad as virgin trains, you will be amazed the effect it will have.