Customer Satisfaction vs. Experience: Strategies for Transit Leaders

Senior Vice President, Deputy Transit and Rail Market Leader
WSP

Would you pay more to wait at a prettier bus stop? One study in Italy suggests the answer is yes.

Researchers showed 300 riders hypothetical upgrades to a bus station near Milan. Seeing more comfortable benches, better-lit platforms, and new shops inspired respondents to pay an average of $4.71 more per trip or travel up to 28 minutes longer to use the upgraded station. A previous study echoes these findings, for rail.

But, there’s a catch: not everyone perceives the same value. The impact was greatest with women over 30 and people who were employed. For men, the changes didn’t seem to have the same impact on satisfaction. It’s one example of why we need to move beyond customer satisfaction scores alone.

Beyond Customer Satisfaction Scores

Some public transit agencies rely on just a handful of performance metrics to gauge customer satisfaction, while others conduct more extensive measures. The data can be useful, but not always actionable insight into the customer experience. There’s a critical difference.

Customer satisfaction typically refers to how riders rate specific aspects of service—such as punctuality, cleanliness, safety, or fare value—and reflects whether a narrow set of expectations were met at particular moments. Metrics are only part of the story.

Customer experience is far broader. It encompasses the entire end-to-end journey, including planning a trip, accessing stations, navigating delays, interactions with staff, reliability across days and routes, and even how disruptions are communicated. And yes, prettier stops and stations.

A rider may be satisfied with an individual trip yet still have a poor overall experience if the system is confusing, unreliable, or stressful. Even calling it “the customer experience” is misleading. It would be more accurate to talk about customer experiences—plural. The subjective experience of the same system on the same day may differ dramatically for individual riders.

One size doesn’t fit all for riders or agencies. Are you serving sprawling suburbs, managing a multimodal system, or planning ahead for extreme heat or snow delays? Your bigger picture context also impacts customer experiences—an issue that has never mattered more.

According to APTA, ridership reached about 85 percent of pre-pandemic levels in 2025. Transit leaders know that the missing 15 percent makes a material difference, and the gap is even greater within some systems. Agencies need to focus on interventions that will make the biggest difference for the way current riders perceive the system, while also positioning themselves to attract new ones. It’s a huge opportunity. How do you get it right?

Your Recipe for Success

While different regions and systems benefit from different approaches, there are both high-tech and high-touch categories every system can consider, including:

• Infrastructure: Is the service safe, reliable, and fast (or at least fast enough)? Do amenities such as phone charging match customer needs? Universal wayfinding can involve technology, but it starts with good design and seeing the system from the passenger’s perspective.
• Technology: Is a TAP card consistently working, can people get the information and support they need when and where they need it, both on board and at home? Technology also makes it easier to consider rewards and gamification, particularly if you aim to attract younger riders.
• Human and sensory elements: Start with low-tech, human elements, with leadership that celebrates bus drivers who get to know their passengers or a visible safety presence. Consider advanced environmental controls such as lighting, ultra-filtration air systems, and scent management. LA Metro is piping in classical music played on a loop.

Given an array of options, where should you start? Here are six recommendations from my years on the front lines, as well as advising agencies of all kinds:

1. Arm yourself with information. Drill down to identify your customer pain points that can deliver the greatest return on investment. Data analytics can eliminate guesstimates and help identify opportunities for savings you can reinvest in areas that customers value more. Just keep in mind that in some areas, such as safety, perception is the rider’s reality, regardless of what the metrics tell you.
2. Think systemically. Shift from siloes to networked thinking. For example, insufficient internal synchronization forced one agency to dig the same hole three times; when it came time to work on a different bus line, aligned ways of working helped it time the dig to multiple needs, getting it all done just once. Similarly, prioritize interventions that can deliver multiple benefits, and look for partners who can help with a broad range of needs, from project visualization to grant applications to event planning to asset optimization.
3. Trust your team. Insights can come from anyone, anywhere. So, ask for input and listen carefully, even if you don’t personally identify with the ideas. For example, at IndyGo, I trusted my Millennial and Gen Z team to implement a social media-heavy strategy, which ultimately resulted in industry-leading customer engagement.
4. Future-proof your investments. I frequently see draft grant applications filled with “wants.” Fiscal realities often collide with those ambitions. Start with the biggest needs today, backed by a phased plan to address the wants over time.
5. Become adept at communication. Communicate more than you think is needed and build in multiple channels for feedback. Start with the “why” behind proposed changes and help people visualize the benefits. Create before-and-after renderings, interactive 3D walk-throughs, or short flyover videos. Engage multiple audiences. For example, policymakers may lack on-the-ground insight, so it’s critical to connect their decisions to your operational realities, as well as what matters most to the communities you both serve.
6. Lean on “friends.” The complexity of modern transit systems means agencies shouldn’t try to go it alone. Benchmark across agencies and learn from your peers. Look for outside partners who can equip you with resources and expertise that you might not know are available, helping to enhance customer experiences from social media to sidewalk to seat.

These principles can build better customer experiences and help strengthen cities themselves. It never hurts to remind your stakeholders that public transit connects people to opportunity, generating about $5 in economic returns for every $1 invested, and to one another, enhancing the social cohesion that is key to overall well-being.

If public transit is a city’s lifeblood, then a focus on customer experiences can help keep it pumping.