Request ID: FOI-0181-2223 Date published: 16 May 2022
You asked
Dear Transport for London,
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.
We answered
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
