Let's discuss the return on investment for transit customer experience programs,

Innovative customer service KPIs and methods to share with your Customer Service Team to transform the customer experience of complainants.

13-minute primer on how to build a Customer Experience program at your transit agency

Increasingly, transit leaders are customer experience (CX) champions. Listen to recent interviews with Mayors, Board members, and Transit CEO's, and you will hear about improvements they are making to the Customer Experience (and often Employee Experience!). Transit leaders feel pressure to deliver CX and EX improvements from not only employees, riders and journalists, but also from funding agencies that want shorter headways, user-friendly fare payment, and improvements to c

Customer centricity is largely a cultural affair. If employees at all levels are genuinely passionate about delivering excellent experiences, Customer Experience (CX) will blossom and the agency will thrive. In the WIIFM (what's in it for me) world we live in though, it's helpful to also use cash bonuses to incentivize CX outcomes. Financial incentives are a great way to align the organization around CX improvements and get employees at all levels to row together! CX financia

How reliable is reliable enough? How clean is clean enough? How safe is safe enough? To answer these kinds of questions, transit agencies will often compare Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) with peer transit agencies. There are, however, a variety of pitfalls to be avoided. For example, interagency comparisons will not be valid if the contexts are different. If one agency operates in exclusive rights of way, and another agency operates on the street, is it fair to compare o

People wonder: Why does it take government so long to get things done? Well, part of the reason is that government has so many objectives. We want government to act quickly to meet the needs of the public, but we also want government to: control expenditures select employees and contractors fairly avoid conflicts of interest give communities an opportunity to review projects and have any negative impacts mitigated pay attention to environmental sustainability advance equity t

When you are developing a Transit CX program, one of the first questions to resolve is the Scope of the effort. To define scope, there are two key questions to answer: Who is the "Customer" in Customer Experience? What aspects of the Customer Experience are in scope? 1. Let's start with "Who is the "customer" in Customer Experience?" Is it only bus and rail riders? Does it include paratransit customers? Does it include those who use ancillary services you may provide like sha

You can maximize the effectiveness of your Customer Experience (CX) program by linking CX with your organization's annual budget process. The budget process is a place where tradeoffs are considered and decisions made that have a huge impact on the customer experience. Make sure that customer voices have a role in that process and budget decisions are aligned with the results of your Customer Experience surveys. Likewise for both operating and capital budget decisions. One fa

Where should Customer Experience (CX) reside in your organization? The answer is: it depends.... Ideally, if the CEO or President of your agency is passionate about CX and wants a broad, comprehensive program, CX should reside in the Office of the CEO. That will maximize the impact of the CX program and alignment with the CEO's vision. Positioning CX in the Office of the CEO gives the program stature and places it in a location that spans all parts of the organization. It als

A systematic, agency-wide approach is needed to create an effective customer experience program. Here is a quick overview of key building blocks (along with links to more detailed blog posts): Identifying and Remedying Pain Points CX starts with understanding customer pain points using valid surveys and real time "live listening" through social media and call centers. Tip: The best source of information for CX is in-the-moment surveys to detect issues during the customer jour

Does Transit Ridership Matter Any More? Yes it does!