CUSTOMER SERVICE
PUTTING OUR CUSTOMERS AT THE HEART OF WHAT WE DO
WOULDN'T IT BE REFRESHING TO FIND A TRANSPORT COMPANY THAT PUTS CUSTOMERS AT THE HEART OF ITS STRATEGY? THAT'S WHAT WE ARE DOING.
Great service comes from the heart. Like many companies, we strive to “delight our customers”. In our business, that is not something we can achieve with systems and processes alone. Great customer service is essentially personal. It is delivered to people, by people who recognise their individual needs and concerns and act on them, there and then. We opened our third Customer Service Academy in 2006. And this year we are putting even more emphasis on training and empowering our people, particularly those on the front line to enable them to make a difference.
Some of our services are the best in the business – Midland Mainline won the 2006 National Rail Award for “Passenger Operator of the Year” and Gatwick Express continues to top the National Passenger Survey tables for customer satisfaction. We want to achieve that kind of performance right across the Group. So we have been listening to customers more systematically, using increasingly detailed research to identify and fix the things that dissatisfy them, and make improvements across the board.
In North America, the customers for our school bus operations are school boards. Our regular customer questionnaires have always showed high levels of satisfaction, confirmed by a contract renewal rate of greater than 95%. Last year we held 150 in-depth interviews with all our customers in the US and Canada, which identified some important opportunities. For example, local management’s responsiveness to customers is strongly linked to customer retention. Armed with this insight, we are taking appropriate action to provide tools for our management teams.
SATISFACTION IS THE FIRST STEP - NOW HOW DO WE DELIGHT?
In our Trains division, our customer satisfaction programme focuses on one aspect at a time, until we get that aspect right. First we tackled performance and punctuality, and achieved significant improvements (see “Getting the detail right” in the section Operational Excellence). In 2006 we worked to get the cleanliness and presentation of our trains to a consistently high standard. This year we are focusing on customer communication – especially to keep people better informed about service disruptions.
In Buses we have run a back to basics programme focused on vehicle cleaning and presentation. This included making cleaning more frequent, setting higher standards of presentation, appointing supervisors to make sure we meet our targets whilst also trialling material to make window glass etching easier to remove.
In Coaches we have gone a stage further by engaging with customers directly – piloting a mobile phone based service that enables them to report faults on the move by text message. For example, when one customer reported that a toilet wasn’t working, we were able to text back to say that our team were standing by at the next stop to fix it. And they did. We are extending this service across the whole network in 2007.
In 2006 we also looked at the response times in our customer contact centres. We piloted a number of improvements, and in 2007 we are putting in further significant investment. We are enthusiastic adopters of technology to give customers more information and more control over their travel.
In our Coach division we are installing touch-screen kiosks that help customers plan their journeys, print personalised timetables and buy their tickets. These have proved extremely popular with both customers and the Customer Experience Advisers who answer queries at coach stations: now they can hand customers an instant timetable for any journey, however complex. The first nine machines at our busiest coach stations sold £1.7m of tickets in their first year. In response to customer demand we are now introducing a new design that accepts cash as well as payment cards.
In Travel West Midlands we are using Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) technology to improve bus services. So far, over 400 buses – about a quarter of the fleet – are fitted with a satellite tracking system, which enables our control centre to ensure buses arrive at the correct intervals. The system also sends timetables or estimated wait times to bus stops equipped with information displays. And now passengers need not even go to the bus stop to see when their bus is due. By texting their stop’s unique code number, they can receive timetable information to their mobile. The system, which will be available for all 12,000 of our West Midlands stops by mid-2007, is being delivered by a partnership between us, the WMPTA – Centro transport authority, and local councils.
We have invested some £2m in our West Midlands AVL and text messaging technology. But delighting the customer need not always mean huge expenditure. It comes from thoughtful little touches – like the conspicuously uniformed roving support staff that Alsa employ in a number of major Spanish coach stations to provide help and advice at peak travel times.
Or the unexpected. On the last working day before Christmas, our Midland Mainline teams decided to make things a bit special for their customers. There were magicians doing tricks up and down the aisles on trains, and games of pass the parcel. One station had a jazz band, another handed out sweets, and Derby had a cathedral choir. Simple. But it made a lot of people’s day.
