Leveraging Customer Experience Programs
10/15/2024
While the public transit industry has traditionally focused on efficiency, capacity, and safety, it is undergoing a dramatic shift in priorities as agencies embrace Customer Experience (CX) as a core element of service delivery.
This is evidenced by the fact that six years ago, there were just a handful of agencies in North America with formal CX programs. Today, there are 60 agencies in North America that have some form of CX program, according to Aaron Weinstein, executive consultant with Transit CX and moderator of The Rapid Ascent of Customer Experience Programs session held at APTA’s 2024 TRANSform.
Weinstein noted that CX is the sum total of the experiences customers have at every stage of their journey and that a CX program is a systematic set of activities for resolving customer experience issues. Public transit operators should always be concerned with what customers see, hear, smell, and feel, Weinstein said.
Listening to the rider is key to customer experience, said Jennifer Vides, chief customer experience officer at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She said that her agency is committed to listening to passengers and learning from them about their pain points so that the agency can change and improve.
Sound Transit, Seattle, WA, built passenger experience into the core values of the organization, according to Russ Arnold, Deputy CEO, service delivery. He said the agency operates under the premise that its system should be simple, seamless, and intuitive. Passengers should be able to flow through it like water.
Being effective at customer experience requires an agency to be flexible, said Patricia Lucy, director of the brand, marketing & ridership division at TransLink, New Westminster, BC, Canada. It takes constant listening and the ability for organizations that are often used to planning decade-long projects to be nimble to the customers’ needs, she said.