Rail industry has got satisfaction all wrong

Peter Stonham refers to unsatisfactory customer communications by some rail operators over the weeks of heavy snow (New Transit February). He implies that the industry should take a hard look at its systems and style. Before I read his words, I read the latest figures from Passenger Focus, that reveal 83% of rail users were satisfied with the rail services they were receiving according to the National Passenger Survey of Autumn 2009. Well then, I thought, obviously most customers would not agree that rail operators have got it wrong, because the satisfaction surveys say so.  Then I took a closer look at the results.

As the word ‘satisfaction’ can mean anything, especially when you don’t define expectation levels, a better indicator of customer satisfaction is ‘value for money for the price of your ticket’, and the survey conveniently included questions to that effect. The table below can be extracted from the published results.

The table shows that between 8 and 71% of rail customers did not say that the industry achieves a satisfactory level of value for money. So Peter Stonham would seem to be correct after all. I wonder what action the big retailers or hoteliers or, yes, here’s a good one, coach operators would take if 71% of their customers viewed their services to be unimpressive in terms of value for money.  They would surely question the adequacy of their management strategies - that is, if they expected to be around for any time.

Rail passenger satisfaction scores