Setting Numeric Goals on the Number of Customer Complaints against Bus Drivers

An important part of service quality improvement for city and suburban bus companies has to do with the performance of their bus drivers. A popular way to assess that performance, from the customers’ perspective, is to measure the number of customer complaints about bus drivers’ performance. Many companies have developed a system of complaint codes to classify them. Such coding systems allow the isolation of employee-related customer complaints. Each route’s employee performance can be monitored by keeping track of the number of customer complaints in the “Employee” code group for that route. Analysis of the number of “Employee” complaints of over 120 bus routes at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) over years has shown that larger and higher ridership routes usually tend to generate more complaints. A high ridership route with highly professional employees might get more complaints than a low ridership route with lower performance employees. Comparing these 2 routes by their complaint numbers would be comparing apples with oranges. By the same token, targets on the number of complaints of these routes should be different. The method described in this paper analyzes the effects of various ‘independent’ parameters of a bus route on the number of customer complaints against route drivers. Using statistical analysis of the local data, a goal line for all routes’ employee complaints is constructed; this leads to the calculation of an individual target for each route. These individual targets take all the route’s ‘out-of-control’ parameters into consideration; they are fair and logical. This method may be adapted to the local conditions of other bus companies for the definition of realistic targets on the number of customer complaints against employees of each route. The only requirement is that there should be a large enough number of bus routes for this type of statistical analysis.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP010 Transit Management and Performance.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Molayi, Bijan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus drivers; Bus routes; Customer satisfaction; Quality of service; Statistical analysis
• Identifier Terms: Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority
• Uncontrolled Terms: Complaints
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01551857
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-0243
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 27 2015 11:24AM