METRO RESPONDS TO THE NEW SURVEY I DESIGNED FOR THEM

I hope everyone will do the survey voluntarily and post it here, too.  Because they are totally out of touch with their bus riders.  And it is ridiculous that the biggest part of their service is buses, and they only survey the Metrolink.

They don't know their customers' needs or they pretend they don't.  They need overwhelming evidence of how difficult it is to get around in a timely manner on their buses! 

They need to be confronted with how ridiculous so many of their routes and transfers are, especially travelling from north St. Louis and county.

Take the survey by calling customer service and volunteering the answers to the questions in the post (actually compiled from the surveys in use in bigger cities- conducted as I outline).
http://optinstl.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-metros-new-survey-should-be.html

They could save some money on words.  So many pretty words, that don't really say anything at all.  Thanks Metro!

Thank you for your feedback regarding Metro customer surveys. I appreciate your comments regarding the potential for a “take one” survey or comment card made available onboard vehicles. I will discuss this with our Market Research and Customer Service staff. In the past, our front-line supervisors routinely collected customer feedback via comment cards, but the volume of information made it difficult to enter a database, and we found that the trends present in that information mirrored the information collected via other mechanisms, including our Onboard Survey (detailed below) and Customer Contacts database (assembled from customer contacts presented via telephone, e-mail, postal mail and social media).

You may not be aware that Metro does conduct onboard surveys, most every spring as funding permits. This Onboard Survey project serves as Metro’s primary market research effort for collecting a wealth of information about its bus and rail customers, including key data related to demographics, travel patterns and behavior, usage characteristics, loyalty and turnover intentions, and attitudes toward service.  Historically, the Onboard Survey effort has provided Metro with numerous operational benefits such as:

·         Measuring the “attitudinal pulse” of our customers

·         Providing crucial insight into who our customers are and how to best serve them

·         Determining key service factors driving customer satisfaction

·         Improving Metro’s ability to manage customer turnover and increase ridership

·         Providing necessary information to make data-driven service planning decisions

·         Enabling the examination of specific customer segments and their unique characteristics, preferences, and behavior, allowing the development of transit service best suited to their needs

·         Providing critical data required for Federal Transit Administration reporting (e.g., Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Program Guidelines) and federal and state grant documentation support.

In recent years, the survey has been divided into two components: an Onboard Travel and a Customer Satisfaction survey. The Onboard Travel survey is designed to help illuminate how/when/where customers travel, including origin and destination locations and route pairs. The Customer Satisfaction Survey provides meaningful feedback about customer satisfaction with specific components of Metro service. We employ a stratified random sampling strategy for conducting both surveys. This sampling strategy is designed to create samples that are reflective of system-wide passenger characteristics and travel behaviors.

Thank You,

Jessica Mefford-Miller
Chief of Planning and System Development
Metro
707 North First Street
St. Louis, Missouri 63102-2595
Ph: 314.982.1479jnmefford@metrostlouis.org