What Are Your Passengers Saying About You and Why?

A commitment to listening, understanding, and continuously improving upon the passenger experience ensures quality public transit. 

At Transdev, our passengers and their safety and convenience are at the heart of everything we do. When making operational and other decisions, it’s critical to always consider how these decisions will impact the rider experience. Communication and technology are often key to providing passenger timely and convenient information to make their rides more pleasant. Whether it’s with apps, passenger alerts, and customer information, or finding new ways to improve business processes — every new element helps keep the improvement of the passenger experience at the forefront.

Transdev makes it a priority to commit time and resources to listen to our passengers and understand their needs so that we can continuously improve their experience. Transdev has a suite of proprietary programs to measure and improve upon the passenger experience. Each of our programs addresses a specific objective or need that reinforces our commitment to serving our passengers on behalf of our clients.

Engaging with customers

Our Meet the Managers program is designed to engage with passengers and proactively solicit their feedback about our service. This demonstrates our dedication to listening to and identifying passengers needs and then incorporating the feedback into our operations. Managers and executives meet passengers at busy transfer stops to interact with passengers, listen to compliments, concerns, and suggestions. As part of the program, our teams document and subsequently review all customer input and ideas on improving service quality.

Understanding our passengers

T.ex, our customer-centric, operational audit of the passenger experience, is a rigorous program that uses proprietary and award-winning methodology to find opportunities to improve the passenger experience. The process involves a thorough assessment of all aspects of the customer experience from the point of view of representative customer profiles that represent the system’s ridership profiles. Specific and innovative ideas are developed, along with plans for action and follow-up, all to support the mission of improving the passenger experience.

Listening to our riders

Transdev’s proprietary customer feedback management program, LISTEN, is designed to record, respond, and analyze customer feedback received across multiple channels. Born from best practices of Transdev’s global operations and enriched with benchmarks from leading industries, LISTEN helps our teams and clients consolidate and centralize passenger feedback, manage the investigation process, respond with “plug and play” tools (e.g., library of standard response paragraphs), analyze feedback and provide useful, timely reporting of customer issues and trends.

Measuring our progress

Mystery Traveler is Transdev’s customized “secret shopper” program for operations where we rigorously measure performance in all aspects of service delivery to passengers from a quality standpoint. The program offers a digital platform, centralized dashboards, and standardized detailed reports that you can use. We manage third-party vendors to complete the fieldwork assessments, but the program was created by and is fully managed by Transdev.

Collecting data to drive change

Rooted in international best practices, our passenger surveys help gather and examine all aspects of passenger satisfaction at a location. This data, along with input received via social media and formal complaints, offer answers about passenger perceptions and provides a framework for understanding and prioritizing key actions. The results help us understand, not only what we are doing well and what is an opportunity for improvement, but also to see which aspects are most important to driving overall satisfaction for passengers.

Creating a positive passenger experience is one of the many moving parts that go into a delivering on a successful operation. What we do every day revolves around our passengers and bringing them to where they need to be safely, efficiently, and reliably. Passengers are at the heart of what we do at Transdev every day and this is why we invest in customer experience as a way to drive continuous improvement.

Mitun Seguin is VP, Marketing and Communications, for Transdev