Last weekend I hopped on board a train from Manchester to London – a journey I used to make almost every week for work. Back then, it was operated by Virgin Rail and while the duration was usually a pain, generally speaking the overall experience was bang on.
However, back in 2019 some money clearly changed hands in Whitehall, and Avanti took over. Since then, they’ve done a phenomenal job of being essentially the worst performing operator in the country for a sustained period of time. Every anecdote involing them is usually fuelled by pure rage.
So obviously I was thrilled to be travelling with them that Friday afternoon.
Now, due to events entirely out of their control (for once, this isn’t sarcasm) there was major distruption on the line, so several services were cancelled and many more delayed. We were lucky – delayed by an hour but on a train which wasn’t overcrowded, and therefore we got a seat. Minor stress, but major relief once we made it on-board.
As part of my healthy relationship with alcohol I decided that 4:30pm was the perfect time for a beer, so I popped on over to the shop, selected some bevs and snacks, only to notice a paper bag over the card machine with “cash only” inscribed on top. And on the basis that I was born in the last 40 years I natrually didn’t have any cash.
No bother, let’s just fill up a bottle from the water fountain.
But of course, the water fountain was broken too. So persistently broken in fact, they had a branded viynl sticker behind it saying a new one was on the way.
When I spoke to my friends in London about it that evening, they confirmed that the card machines on all Avanti trains were permabroken.
Which led me to conclude that Avanti has a culture of not giving a shit – to have so many issues speaks to a pervasive attitude of apathy and disrespect towards the customer. They’re not motivated to provide an excellent service because they’re basically impossible to displace in the short-term.
Bare Necessities: Actual photo of the Avanti HQ team planning their service levels.
Excellent doesn’t happen by accident. The quality of your output over any period of time is fundamentally a product of how much of a shit you give. Apathy breeds mediocrity.
This got me thinking about why cultural design and maintenance is so critical to a company’s long term success – the culture defines how the inhabitants of a company should operate when faced with novel challenges that are not clearly defined as part of a process.