Dear Mr Hughes

TfL Ref: 0181-21223

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26
April 2022 asking for information about copies of all scripts and
templates that are used by our customer services.

Your request will be processed in accordance with the requirements of the
Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. 

A response will be sent to you by 24 May 2022. We publish a substantial
range of information on our website on subjects including operational
performance, contracts, expenditure, journey data, governance and our
financial performance. This includes data which is frequently asked for in
FOI requests or other public queries. Please check
[1]http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transpar... to see if this helps you.

We will publish anonymised versions of requests and responses on the
[2]www.tfl.gov.uk website. We will not publish your name and we will send
a copy of the response to you before it is published on our website.

In the meantime, if you would like to discuss this matter further, please
do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

show quoted sections

Dear Mr Hughes

TfL Ref: 0181-21223

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26
April 2022 asking for information about copies of all scripts and
templates that are used by our customer services.

Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000 and our information access policy. You asked: Under
the Freedom Of Information Act please attach all scripts and templates
that are used by your customer service to respond to people by, phone,
post, email, contact form, social media, and any other methods.

I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, to
provide the information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate
limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and
Fees) Regulations 2004.

Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with
requests if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the
information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other
information would exceed the appropriate limit. In this instance, we
estimate that the time required to answer your request would significantly
exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the
Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.

We have a number of contact centres – including outsourced centres that
work on our behalf - consisting of many different teams.  Scripts and
templates which may be used to respond to customers who make enquiries to
TfL in all the various formats across all the contact centres we operate
will not all be stored in a central repository and / or universally used
by all agents.   The teams within our contact centres are likely to have
their own specific templates depending on the service area they work in,
for example buses; it is also very likely that agents will have developed
their own templates which will also not be stored centrally and that these
may potentially have been shared with other team members and further
amended to suit the agents individual style and preferences. It should be
noted that our main customer services department within TfL has generally
moved away from using standard templates and advisers tend to tailor each
response to the customers contact, rather than send generic replies.
Finally it should also be noted that even if we did attempt to collate the
information you have requested, we couldn’t be certain as to when we had
gathered it all together and when to cease our search.

To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450
limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on
matters which are important to you.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a
request for specific documents, TfL does not have to answer your question
if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a
judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at
the time of your request. If you have specific questions relating to these
topics we may be more easily able to respond to these than to a request
for any information held.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached
information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

From: FOI
Sent: 28 April 2022 11:36
To: 'Malcolm Hughes' <[1][FOI #857037 email]>
Subject: new foi ref 0181-2223 CRM:0138634

Dear Mr Hughes

TfL Ref: 0181-21223

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26
April 2022 asking for information about copies of all scripts and
templates that are used by our customer services.

Your request will be processed in accordance with the requirements of the
Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. 

A response will be sent to you by 24 May 2022. We publish a substantial
range of information on our website on subjects including operational
performance, contracts, expenditure, journey data, governance and our
financial performance. This includes data which is frequently asked for in
FOI requests or other public queries. Please check
[2]http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transpar... to see if this helps you.

We will publish anonymised versions of requests and responses on the
[3]www.tfl.gov.uk website. We will not publish your name and we will send
a copy of the response to you before it is published on our website.

In the meantime, if you would like to discuss this matter further, please
do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

show quoted sections