Amtrak’s unfortunate trip planner
Hi, Brendan here. I’m Trillium’s data engineer and I love working on this side of transit, the side that figures out new ways to make using public transit a convenient joy. Being able to use the bus or train even if you primarily use other forms of transportation can be a freeing experience. Which is why I’ve found Amtrak’s trip planner to be so frustrating.
Recently, I tried to plan a trip to Seattle, WA from Portland, OR. I typed in “PDX” as my origin and “Seattle, WA” as my destination and filled in the dates. The screen below was what I got as my result.
Search results for query "PDX" to "Seattle, WA"
At first I thought that there were no trips available that day. This would most likely lose some users who were not committed to taking the train and had other transportation options. After clicking around a bit more and searching through the Amtrak national station list, I realized that there are two stations in the Seattle area and the one that returns when a customer searches for “Seattle, WA” is not served by the Starlight or Cascades routes, two of the most popular in the area. After choosing the other Seattle station, the trip returned fine, but Amtrak just added multiple customer-losing steps between a potential train rider and their ticket.
It seems like a major oversight, and it is, but it is not the only time that this has happened with the Amtrak trip planner. It’s even worse with the San Francisco Bay Area, which has more stations than Seattle. It seems like common sense to show a customer all the possible trips for their query area, as nearly all trip planners, from airlines to Google Maps, do. Amtrak doesn’t do that, though. What Amtrak ends up doing is providing a great example of the problems an organization creates and the revenue it loses when they design a customer interface without the customer in mind.
Customer information: not a side dish but part of the main course
Since the fundamental purpose of a transit agency seems to be putting transit vehicles on the street, it’s easy to assume that basic service provision is a much more important than providing information about that service.
Inspired by More Riders, I would argue that service provision and providing customer information are equally fundamental to serving a community and providing mobility options. “Customer information” is the term transit agencies use for their public-facing information — route & system maps, timetables, etc.
Even if an agency offers a great system from a planning and operations perspective — frequent, on-time service on a dense network of well-connected routes — if their customer information doesn’t do the job of helping people use and benefit from this system easily, then the system is under performing its potential in crucial ways — in rider satisfaction and the number of passengers transported to jobs and services, for example.
Consider software as an analogy. Even if you offer powerful, feature-rich software, if it’s difficult to use most people won’t benefit much from it. With software and with transit, ease-of-use is crucial to overall usefulness.
GetSatisfaction.com’s community webcast series
I am a fan of GetSatisfaction.com, a site where customers of companies and organizations can ask questions, share ideas, report problems, or give praise in a public forum. Other customers, as well as company representatives, can then answer those queries.
They’ve begun a “Community Webcast” series. I plan to attend a few and think about how this theme applies for public transit.
Their next webinar, Reducing Customer Service Support Costs by Turning to the Community, is tomorrow. Go sign up!
If you want to see an example of online community-powered support in action for transit, check out yesterday’s conversation on Humboldt Transit Authority’s unofficial GetSatisfaction forum. The discussion is about dogs and the bus. Here, riders have provided detailed information on the law, rules, and regulations. Not only is this at no cost to the agency, but providing a space for this sort of discussion may facilitate greater and broader understanding of and respect for the rules.
Rider-powered customer service for transit
Less than a year ago, I saw a presentation on GetSatisfaction.com, a site that hosts user-powered customer service forums. To me, the site offers an inspiring, slightly provocative, and savvy approach to customer interaction.
You can browse some of their (beautiful and interesting) slide decks online. One presentation is Customer Service is the New Marketing. The other is Be Like the Internet – 8 steps to success in a post 2.0 world. It’s not a presentation, but I also recommend checking out their very charming Company-Customer Pact.
One of their points is that customers have so many venues to vent, rant, and communicate in the networked world that their voices are going to be heard and trumpeted all over the internet regardless of whether a company sets up a forum at GetSatisfaction.com. Wouldn’t you rather this happen in a forum where customers feel like they are heard, where the campany cares, and where people remind each other they are dealing with human beings?
They boil this idea down to a few suggestions:
- Reduce your sphere of control to increase your sphere of influence
- The way for a business to thrive in the networked world is to adapt to the network (get used to it being out of your control)
- Most of what matters to your business is happening outside your business
