Customer feedback: an interesting comparison

A few weeks ago I had a rather annoying bus experience, with at least a couple of buses not turning up or being exceedingly late. Usually that would be just somewhat annoying, but on this particular occasion my daughter’s parent-teacher interviews were set down for 6.10pm and because of the exceedingly late bus I was only able to make it there for the last couple of minutes of our alloted time. So I did what everyone should do when they have a poor public transport experience, and complained on the MAXX website.

The feedback I got from NZ Bus is very apologetic, but offers nothing in terms of “we’re going to try to make things better by doing this”.

Thank you for your email about the apparent late running of the 17:15 pm 004 service on the 5th August 2010. We would like to apologise for the very late reply.

NZ Bus aim to be the way the people of our communities choose to travel.

We aim to deliver a service that is reliable for our passengers and are always looking at ways to improve this. Feedback such as yours is very welcome as it allows us to identify areas that may need improvement.

We conducted GPS reports which confirm that the trip did run but was running 20 minutes late..

Further investigation at the depot confirms that the reason for this is, it is that the previous trip ran late due to heavy traffic.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused and I hope that the next time you travel with us, we are able to provide the kind of travel experience that meets your expectations.

I (finally) got a reply from ARTA today that is a little bit more constructive:

We are sorry to hear about your experience with the bus services on August 5th.

ARTA acknowledges your comments on the use of Hobson Street for buses and are currently considering a number of options as part of the work we are doing with Auckland City Council on bus routings in and around the CBD.

In regards the specific incident, the bus operator has confirmed the 004 trip started between 10 and 15 minutes late due to traffic, this is most probably the bus service that called your stop at around 5.40pm. As a consequence to the late start, the real time system would have been initially transmitting the ‘scheduled’ times and then ‘drop’ the service from the screen after the system failed to recognise any signal from the service starting.

In other words, if the real time system does not receive a receive a message within about 10 minutes after the trip was due to start – it will send out a message to all the GPS units asking which vehicle is running the trip. If no reply is received, it will initially display “DLY” in the screen. If no reply is received after a few attempts, it will drop the service from the sign -this tends to happen with the signs which are within about 10 minutes of the start of the route.

ARTA plans to enhance the real time system with a new lay out that will display both ‘scheduled’ and ‘real’ times. This is expected to be completed in April next year and will provide our customers with a clearer picture of what is happening.

We hope this helps you clarify the way the real time system operates. More importantly, please accept our apologies for a service experience that clearly fell short from the standard we aim to provide.

It’s interesting that NZ Bus said the bus ran 20 minutes late while ARTA said the bus ran 10-15 minutes late. But putting aside that discrepancy for a minute, I must say that I’m fairly impressed by this response (I wonder if I would have got something so thorough had I not been a transport blogger…. but that’s another story). It recognises that there’s a fundamental problem with running 004/005 buses up Hobson Street, it recognises that there’s a fundamental problem with the way the real-time information signs work and it says that efforts will be made in the future to remedy these issues.

I must say I’m impressed. Good job ARTA – now let’s make sure you follow through on those improvements.

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