Hi all,
I am the retail systems manager for Northern, the TVMs fall under my remit. Sorry to hear some people do not like our new software. We have run focus groups and also stakeholder groups and met with quite favorable feedback. That said, things can only be improved upon and a few areas I wish to change, so if people would like to leave feedback here, I will pick it up along with our other channels. If you don't mind me contacting you to discuss, that would also be great. Its our first change of software for around 7 years, so to provide such a large scale change which includes: anywhere to anywhere ticketing, ticket for any day, Duos, reservations, Darwen feed and Smart seasons has been quite some effort to pull together. However all feedback is welcome.
Many thanks
Ian Borthwick, Retail Systems Manager, Northern
Hi,
Thank-you so much for your response. I apologise for the fact your hard work has been met with negative responses, my choice of title for this thread probably wasn't particularly nice to hear. Ultimately, I appreciate the thought of including advance fares into the ticket vending machine process, however I feel the implementation involves too many steps.
I think maybe what's happened in regards to focus groups/stakeholder groups having more favourable responses to passengers/customers (as well as the negative bias this thread title may attract) is that when you've come in to an office and given plenty of time to learn and navigate a system, it probably seems fine. However, at a station when people may have a short amount of time to purchase a ticket and are in a more time critical setting, the system can be confusing/frustrating and feels like it is working against you.
Here are my personal ideas as to what might work better:
1. Moving the machines back to the previous software for the time being, (or at least the majority, leaving one or two available for the purchase of advance tickets.)
2. Removing the "basket" and related prompts as well as the prompt regarding the receipts.
3. Moving the advance ticket options to a different menu altogether, such as the tickets from other stations and ticket collection as generally people don't arrive at the station with the intention of booking a ticket in advance and simply want a standard single/return fare as quickly as possible. Although, I do appreciate the consideration of adding this in as a feature.
4. Making tickets to "other" stations, rather than the five most popular easy to access, perhaps just a search bar at the top that can be pressed and directly typed into would work best.
5. Removing a need to look at a timetable when purchasing a normal ticket.
Obviously trying to give passengers more ticket options seems like it has been a major challenge and I understand that you wish to present them with all the options available, some of which likely provide significantly better value. However, the experience from me and other people I talked to at the TVMs seemed to be that of considerable confusion. A system which provides better ticketing options isn't as useful if people can't work out how to buy the tickets!
Thanks a lot for listening to and engaging with our concerns, really means a lot to me and likely to other people on this thread as well!