COURSE 06 - SERVICE AND AUTHORITY DESIGN
Set clear expectations for passengers at each stage of their journey
A passenger at a stop needs the same reliable answer as someone using the app or speaking to an adviser. When a service fails, each channel must carry the update, and one role must make sure that happens. Course 6 brings together the people who manage these parts of the journey. Your team will use its network information and customer contact records to decide what passengers can expect, how concerns reach the right people and which improvements to make first. You will start a five-part Customer Service Plan in the room. It will be a working draft for your Authority to review, develop and take through its usual decision-making process.
Request Course 6How the day works.
Around four-fifths of the six teaching hours is spent on applied work.
Your team will examine ten customer-service responsibilities, from timetable information and complaints to safety reports and promotion of the network. For each, you will name the role doing the work today and identify any gaps. You will also consider how responsibility changes under franchising, an Enhanced Partnership or an existing local transport plan.
Your team will identify the passenger groups your Authority needs to reach and how each group can get information or help. You will consider people who may need a staffed or printed channel, as well as people who could travel but do not currently do so. Where a channel is missing, you will record what it might cost to provide.
Your team will map five stages of travel across five contact points: app, website, bus stop, on-board information, and customer contact by phone or in a travel centre. For each point, you will record what a passenger receives and which role is responsible. The map will show where information or a case does not carry across channels. You will also examine photographs of your own stops and specify the information a stop should give passengers, on its printed panel and on a page linked from the stop.
A blocked route on a school morning gives your team a practical test: who notices the problem, who writes the message, and when does it reach the stop, the driver and the other channels? You will then follow a report from a passenger who feels unsafe on a moving bus, from receipt to case closure. The section also looks at how questions, complaints and lost property are handled, and whether the patterns they reveal reach service planners and contract managers.
Your team will choose five commitments from eight examples and record why it did not choose the others. Each promise needs wording passengers can recognise, a place where they will find it, a responsible role and a measure. You will add a starting figure, target and date from your Authority’s own information.
You will consider why people do not travel, including reasons that may never appear in complaints from current passengers. Choose one barrier to address with an action that could start within 90 days. Record who it would help, what it would cost, what to measure before starting, and what result would prompt a change of approach.
Your team will return to the questions raised at the start of the day and record what has been answered and what still needs a decision. You will then put the work in order for the first 90 days, Year 1 and Years 2 to 3, with a role and date for each unfinished item.
What you leave with
Who should attend
The course is designed for colleagues in customer experience, communications, network and operations, ticketing, digital and data, accessibility, contract management, and franchising or bus reform. A contact centre agent, travel centre adviser or driver adds useful first-hand experience of passenger questions and service problems.
Right of Way can hold the workshop at your Authority’s offices or at a venue it arranges. It can stand alone or form part of the wider ten-course programme.
BUILD THE COURSES AROUND YOUR PLAN
Course 6 centres on bus services. You can apply the same approach to trams, trains and booked services. It is relevant whether your Authority is preparing for franchising, working through an Enhanced Partnership or improving services under an existing local transport plan.
Elsewhere in the programme, Course 4 covers network design, Course 5 covers ticketing strategy, Course 7 addresses the systems behind the service, and Course 10 covers managing customer commitments once a contract is live.
Courses 1, 3, 6 and 9 can support your Authority whichever delivery route you choose. If you have not decided on a route yet, contact us and we can discuss how these courses fit your plans.