If you ran a business, would you pay for someone to sit near a telephone from 4am to 1 am 7 days a week (in some cases 24 hours a day), would you pay for 2 people to do that across 2 depots and so on.
Yes, I want to keep my customers happy and still be in business in a few years time. For a small rural operator with half a dozen buses, clearly it's not realistic. But First in the Potteries operates 120 plus buses from a single depot. Tell me there is no-one at the depot or Hanley bus station control room every minute the buses are on the road.
And it's not as if you can incorporate that into anyone else's job, because if everything is running well then there's unlikely to be issues, but if the brown stuff hits the spinny thing then the controllers are going to be busy adjusting drivers, moving breaks, buses, pulling rabbits out of hats etc.
Why not? For a large operator, incidents will be happening all the time - bus, driver, passenger and traffic related. Informing customers of problems with their service is very basic customers service skills stuff.
Thankfully at my employer we have cab radios which in the main are okay, and mobile phone network is really good across most, but not all of the routes we operate. So if we have issues we can contact base, we also have Greenroad tracking as well as a system called novus tracking. However at one of our competitors on a long country route a driver broke down in the middle of nowhere, they don't have cab radios. His phone was dead. He knocked on a residents house to use their landline, he couldn't pull the number off his phone and so they had to google on the residents computer what the depot number was.
Bus tracking ought to be a basic requirement in this day and age. Making that data available to passengers is clearly a good thing. Some operators do it so it is technically feasible, just a lack of willingness from parts of an industry stuck in a customer service backwater. Drivers without their own mobile phone must be few and far between nowadays. A call to the depot (under proper non-driving conditions of course) is easy enough. Dissemination of that information through a web-site / social media is not exactly time consuming.
Finally, in response to your last point. Could you imagine if each operator did invest in a local phone operator to find out what issues there are. There'd be a relentless stream during the day of 'the 11:03 bus (which is every 7 minutes) hasn't turned up and it's 11:05, you're company is ****' - that's what regional customer services are for, they can also hook into this tracking technology, but crucially they can't say why there's an issue.
Railways seem to cope with this problem. They have staff on the ground and at most stations, they have PIS at most stations, they have their own and NR enquiry lines. You can even get data on the go through third-party suppliers (Real Time Trains etc). People only phone to complain that the bus is late if they have no information on where the bus is and know full well that it often never bothers to turn up. Deliver a reliable service, with back up delay information, and those calls would simply not occur.
If the bus runs every 7 minutes, there is no real excuse for complaining. But what if your bus runs less frequently, say every hour - what would be a reasonable time to wait before calling the bus company?
I have done the sums on cost.
First Potteries carries 12m passengers per year. 24/7/365 cover, at £10 per hour with 100% on costs = £175,200 per year. Providing a dedicated (never mind shared or existing daytime provision) would come in at 1.46p per passenger journey. Yes please, I'll pay it, from tomorrow, just don't try sidelining the money.