East Coast
closed down its long-running call centre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne earlier this year. This probably explains why the 0191 numbers we had previously are now defunct, and why the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Freepost postal address has been replaced with a Plymouth one.
Quote:A total of 196 jobs are to be axed at a call centre based in Newcastle for the government-owned train company East Coast.
The call centre is currently run by travel operator National Express.
East Coast said the work was put out to tender in June last year. Successful bidders were Intelenet UK and Atos Origin.
Intelenet UK has centres in Plymouth and Fort William. Atos Origin is based in London.
East Coast said nine out of the 196 staff affected were East Coast-employed, and they were working with them to see if there were suitable redeployment opportunities within the company.
An Evening Chronicle news report from earlier this year says "Instead the work would go to two rival firms with bases in Wolverhampton, Plymouth and Mumbai in India."
The Plymouth office of Intelenet was previously FirstInfo (part of First Group) but was
bought by Intelenet in the first quarter of last year. FirstInfo has come to our attention before as it operates the customer services and reservations* for other rail operators. Unsurprisingly, First Group's franchises are among these.
* I haven't checked now to see if they are still run by Intelenet. I know that we have a number of Plymouth numbers (01752 675) for these, so this might be a useful lead.
The other lead is
Atos Origin whose Wolverhampton office is based at:
Atos
1 Trinity Court
Broadlands
Wolverhampton
WV10 6UH
There was an entry submitted to our database which says it was added two days ago. It is a Wolverhampton number (
01902 627971) and is answered with the same East Coast Web Support IVR (menu) as is on the published 0845 722 5111 number. It has an option for other enquiries, so I think that if we don't find anything better, it will work for reservations and customer services.
I tried nearby numbers and found:
969 ATOS DVLA Payments Service Desk
972 National Rail Games Travel Centre
973 National Rail Games Contact Centre for Assisted Travel
It might be worth doing more digging...
Perhaps someone can find the 08 numbers for these "Games" numbers. I assume they're 08 numbers! Is this the Olympic Games by any chance?