Randall Denley, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Tuesday, November 27, 2007
When the city chose an outsider to head OC Transpo, the hope was that he
would finally resolve Transpo's long-running customer service problems.
It was a good theory, but don't hold your breath. A report yesterday
from an independent consultant detailed what's wrong with our bus
service, but in response, Transpo director Alain Mercier offered only
vague promises of more training and better service. It's not nearly good
enough, and city councillors should demand more.
The solutions to many of the bus service's problems seem straightforward
and it's difficult to understand why they haven't been resolved. OC
Transpo's job is to drive people across town in a bus, not fly them to
the moon. How complicated can it be?
Consultant Dan Baril conducted focus groups with transit users and
employees and rode the buses to prepare his report. Nothing that he
observed would come as a surprise, but his report lays out in detail the
kind of things Transpo customers have been complaining of for years.
These are problems that demand action, not promises. Customers say the
stations and buses are often dirty. Clean them. Riders want real-time
information on where the bus is. Transpo has it, but hasn't figured out
how to get it to customers. Customers say short-term improvements for
the Albert-Slater bottleneck are urgently required. Mercier supports a
city plan to put even more buses into the downtown.
Customers say major transit stations should have a Tim Hortons or a
drycleaners. Any real business would have cashed in on this years ago.
Customers say fare fraud is common. What kind of business isn't even
smart enough to make its customers pay? People want bigger, better signs
marking bus stops. Could anything be simpler?
Yesterday's meeting was full of little gems about the disconnect between
OC Transpo and its customers. The bus company points to the declining
number of complaints as an indicator of good service. More likely, its
customers have learned that complaining is a waste of time. Councillors
on the transit committee had their own complaint, that Transpo is so
slow in responding to its customers that the complaints flow back to the
councillors' offices. Mercier says Transpo's goal is to give a
substantive response to a customer complaint within 10 days. Not that
they're meeting the target.
A disabled bus customer told the committee that elevators at Transpo
stations are frequently out of service, but the city's online transit
planning system doesn't tell customers that and drivers don't always
know either. The result is stranded passengers. Transpo is working on a
solution.
Some routes routinely miss their targets, Mercier said, describing one
that Transpo knows is usually 20 minutes behind schedule. He offered no
solution and no one asked for one.
The consultant showed a short video of an interview with a customer who
raised the OC Transpo classic complaint, where the driver lets the
would-be passenger run for the bus, then takes off as she gets there. A
city councillor told me last week that the same thing had recently
happened to him. It's inexcusable behaviour for anyone in an
organization that pretends to care about customers.
But then, who's to know? Mercier said that there are 350 employees for
each supervisor and that "most of our operators do not see a supervisor
on a regular basis."
The company has spent a lot of money on a GPS system, but it lacks the
software to analyse where service problems actually lie. Many drivers
begin and end their day on the road, Mercier said, and there is no
routine reporting at the end of the day on the problems the driver
experienced. At the same time, the system relies on driver feedback to
know about problems like missing stops because the bus is full.
Mercier said that a call centre trains its new employees for six weeks,
a standard not met by OC Transpo. The key difference would be that call
centres actually rely on quality customer service for their success. OC
Transpo has never really understood the link between customer
satisfaction and success. Mercier shows signs of getting it, but he
needs to tell his customers exactly what he's going to do to fix the
problems and when.
Transit committee members are supposed to be the customers' advocates,
but most are such transit lovers that they hesitate to speak a critical
word about the service because it would be bad for transit's image.
Who do they think they are hiding this information from? It's their own
customers who are saying there is a problem.
The city is talking about "investing" $2 billion in a major expansion of
our transit system. We shouldn't spend a dime until we learn to run the
system that we have now.
Contact Randall Denley at 613-596-3756 or by e-mail,
rdenley [at] thecitizen.canwest [dot] com.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007