this guest blog post talks about how to improve the customer experience of tourists on public transit

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

So you want to reward riders as a way to enhance your customers' experiences and build ridership? What's the best way to do that? There are many options to choose from and pitfalls to avoid. Let's start with three general tips: First of all, as with all new products or services, get clarity on objectives before you begin. Do you want to acquire new customers, strengthen relationships with existing customers, build off-peak ridership, improve brand perception? What's the top p

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

Original image by Exp691 via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Art by Christopher Cheung. Much has been made about the costs and benefits of free transit. Just a sampling of recent articles include: Zero-fare public transit movement gains momentum (cnbc.com) The Case for Making Public Transit Free Everywhere | WIRED Buses Shouldn't Be Free - The Atlantic When Buses Go Free, Public Transit Service Can Suffer - Bloomberg Free transit: Is it a public good, like libraries or schools? - CS

Any CX program is incomplete without User Experience (UX) Testing of products. Are you preparing for your next order of new buses or trains? (Or renovating old ones?) Planning a new website? New apps? Designing new signage? Buying new ticket vending machines? Installing new bus stop shelters? Developing new internal administrative systems? Today's consumers experience unprecedented convenience - purchasing products and services at the click of a mouse and having them show up