Great Western Coffee Shop

From The BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46567134)


I've come across this story before - posting here because (as I understand it) some rail industry customer service is also outsourced to Capita and I've not heard of them being  too fast at responding.

Personal experience of contracts to run training courses where big government agencies outsource specialist training management to Capita mean that I very much believe the story.   The admin, form filling, chasing and delays have turned what should be straightforward bookings and fun courses to give into nightmares - "why did we ever bid for that", "what's the excuse for not paying yet this time" and "never again".  Like I say - personal experience and not necessarily a reflection on the company as a whole - though the BBC story suggests my personal experience is not unique.

Yet another horror story relating to the nonperformance of Capita.  The problem is that when you go out to tender you have to accept the lowest price.  The winning bid cuts corners to give the lowest price and this is reflected in future performance with insufficient resources to deliver the service properly

It is also another case of believing you can take a service to essentially be all delivered online, or a substantial part of it, and pay for this by dismantling the existing structure, in this case a large reduction of on the high street recruiting centres. Leaving aside for a moment the complexity of delivering a robust working system on time (which doesn't seem to have happened here), it does make it more inaccessible to parts of the community. Probably there was a thought that since recruitment is from the young end of the population these would all have ready access to the internet and be comfortable with it. Even if that were true, possibly the diminishing high street presence seems to have had a greater effect than calculated.

August 1989 I walked into the Royal Navy recruitment centre in Taunton. I had my aptitude tests, medical and final interview within 6 weeks.

RN didn't want me, but that's another story...

I was in 5 weeks after first enquiring.  Early December ‘71 advised by school that 6th form had been a mistake.  ::)  Arrived at Torpoint early January 1972.

Paul

You don't actually.  I always wrote into tender documents the phrase. The client will not necessarily accept the lowest or any tender. 

The difficulty is that the short termist bean counters can't bring themselves to accept anything other than the lowest tender, regardless of the consequences. 

Absolutely! It is bad practice simply to take a lowest bid, and anyone running a tender process properly should shortlist, appraise and interview. I expect the problem is partly that public sector procurement is under heavy handed pressure from HM Treasury and that there is a limited number of "the usual suspects" that pitch for everything, and they are selected applying the old "no-one got sacked for choosing IBM" rule.

I almost fell off my chair when I heard that my own business were outsourcing work to Capita, I know it's fashionable to criticise them (in some cases with good reason), but our experience has been pretty positive.

Obviously can't go into too much detail, but they weren't the cheapest, we worked (and continued to work) very closely with them and treat them as partners, rather than contractors, and we set realistic KPIs which at the moment they are hitting every month.

There are a lot of very committed and dedicated people within their organisation but I get that as a group they are vast and disparate and people's experience will be very different.

GWRs already woeful customer service seemed to take even more of a dive when they moved a lot of it to Capita, but I guess it's worth asking whether or not they have specified, and are paying for, the sort of service which their customers deserve? 

In my experience the consequences of blindly accepting the lowest tender was often a contractor who then failed to meet the contract terms. The Gov't Dept concerned would not then exercise their legal rights to enforce the contract, indeed they often ended up throwing even more money at the failed contractor or brought someone else in who said they could do the job at the lowest price............repeat ad nauseam.....

...........I think the whole of the Palace of Westminster has been outsourced to the lowest bidder too !! Peanut & Monkeys.......

Public sector procurement has been a disaster for decades, and the scenario you describe has been very common...…….a lot of these contractors knew that they could get away with murder, as the financial slack was absorbed by the taxpayer, rather than the bottom line of a more commercially astute, professional Client who would be far more rigorous and less forgiving of failure............the saying "you get what you pay for" should be printed in huge letters at the top of each ITT!!!

I am inclined to agree.  The view seems to be that the risk is outsourced so it someone else's fault.  The same view that today has brought us the concept of managed no deal.  When asked what would the manager do Redwood answered 'I don't know I'm not a manager'

It seems that the logic of these people is appoint someone to do the impossible and that's Ok! It's then their fault when it fails and you sack them.  Forgetting the fact that the taxpayer still has to pick up the pieces. 

Capita is often spelt with an "R" inserted after the first letter, there are good reasons for this.
Whilst it is interesting to hear from a respected member of a more positive experience of Capita, such experiences seem to be in the minority.

BTW, I applied for a job with BR decades ago, long before outsourcing, and got an interview the same week. I failed the medical, but at least I knew this promptly and could pursue alternatives. How long would it take these days ?

Its not just public sector the private sector can be just as bad. 

When I first moved from the private to the public sector I could not believe the abysmal quality of major public contracts, and the monitoring of them. It hasn't improved during my time working in the public sector. I am still amazed that all too often there are no information clauses so there is no way of adequately monitoring the contract, just blindly hand over the money.
On the subject of the not taking the cheapest quote, and trying out new things I am always told that one mustn't gamble with public money.

Yep, I went the other way (so to speak!) public to private and the difference was incredible, looking back, having had the perspective of both sectors, you do sometimes wonder how the public sector never seems to learn and is so reluctant/resistant to change......the "that's not how it's done around here" philosophy is still very much dominant.

Capita got another mega raspberry blown in their direction 3 days ago:

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news-parliament-2017/capitas-contracts-with-the-ministry-of-defence-report-published-17-19/

I know someone who was employed by the MoD on Army recruiting. The MoD system was "old" - but it worked ! When they were transferred to Capita everyone in that office, bar one, took redundancy - Capita's reputation came before them....  The person who stayed was re-interviewed for a job which she had done for years by a "manager" who didn't know a soldier from a submarine !

The existing system tried as much as possible to assign a member of staff to each potential soldier - if Mr Would-be soldier 'phoned with a query on his application he knew that Mrs Smith would be dealing with his file. Capita replaced this with a glorified call centre; "your call is important to us"..." we are experiencing heavy demand at the moment"....."you can go to www.Army".   We all love that don't we ?? 
Just to make it even better the call centre was located in the middle of nowhere - so from the word go it was understaffed.   Still, Capita were probably happy with that as it kept the wage bill down - and they could "prove" that they were doing the job the Civil Service used to do with far fewer personnel.  Is it surprising that Army recruiting is in the dreadful state that it is now ?

I spent 23 years in the Royal Navy - if their recruiting system back in the 60s had been anything like the present shambolic Army system - I, too, wouldn't have bothered !

Not the MOD ...


I've seen that response too ... though not for a while.  But then I've not complained for a while.

Does "we're rather busy" get switched on and off ... or has it been there for so long it has lost its value?

If on/off, what's going on / happened that has made them so busy at the moment?