Merseyrail ticket offices

Merseyrail have recently been advertising that you can buy the cheapest tickets to anywhere in the country from any of their stations. I decided to put it to the test at my local station.
I tried to purchase advance singles using a Two Together railcard to Man Vic from Lime Street and return on same day.
Nation Rail was quoting £9.20.
Merseyrail staff at my local station quoted me £18.20 for two returns, I advised him that I wanted advanced singles, he said £18.20 was the best fare available buying from Merseyrail. I was then asked where I got the original £9.20 quote from and when I said Nation Rail website, I was told they were a different company and the best available from Merseyrail was £18.20.
Later that morning I made the same request at Merseyrail Liverpool Central and was charged £9.20 as per National Rail quotation.
I doubt if I will even try purchasing tickets from Merseyrail in the future as it appears that some of their staff only seem competent at selling tickets for their own network.

That's not an isolated case.

Until recently, I lived in Birkenhead and had problems for five years running (!) getting any type of Advance ticket at all from various Merseyrail ticket offices.

The look on their face when I mentioned I also wanted to pay with Rail Travel Vouchers was priceless

I'd suggest writing a quick email to Merseyrail, but I don't think it'll make any difference tbh.

I have contacted Merseyrail but not expecting much of a reply.

Merseyrail have a massive problem with lazy, poorly-trained ticket office staff (interested in doing nothing but selling returns to Liverpool) who are a massive advertisement for any proposal to close all the ticket offices and replace with TOD enabled TVMs. If they would just implement London-style contactless payment for journeys on their network there would be even less of a case for them.

The case for ticket offices is for professional, knowledgeable service. They need to (preferably) buck their ideas up, improve their training and performance monitoring, and offer that professional, knowledgeable service. Or if they can't, or can't be bothered, close them and get the TVMs installed.

Got to say that the guy at Liverpool Central was very professional, helpful and knew what he was doing.

Having lived on the Merseyrail network for pretty much all of my life, I've had my fair share of experiences with their ticket offices.

My view on having used them for a variety of journeys, is that whilst there are a fair few who are friendly and profesional, their lack of knowledge and/or training is clearly evident. Trying to buy tickets to anywhere that's not Liverpool/Merseyrail will meet you with perplexed looks. Paying with RTV's? Good luck! Booking advance tickets? Forget it! Another thing that irks me slightly is that their ticket office nor TVM's are not able to recall TOD, which is very annoying for me or anybody living on the Merseyrail network. Maybe they are forcing us to use their ticket offices?