Good Customer Service In The Bus/Coach Industry

Andyh82 said:

I often cringe at some of the responses on Twitter by the likes of First

Quite often people asking the question will know more than the person answering?

“Due to road works buses 1 & 2 will not serve stop X”
Does this also effect bus 3, which goes the same way someone will ask
“We are not aware of any change to service 3” will be the response

Someone asked FirstWestYorks if they were still able to use their WYMetro MCard when the 184 changes to the Bee Network

“@Beenetwork will be able to help with this query” was the response

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Reminds me of calling a tax helpline some years ago to ask for guidance as to what a line in the regulations meant.
All they could do was read the line back at me.

richw said:

One of the few big groups that have kept socials local. Normally replies are from JB in their customer service department. JB is very enthusiastic and passionate about the industry and owns a preserved bus too. Not your normal contact centre staff based 100s of miles away with no interest in the industry

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I do hope the new Spanish - Australian owners, who are putting the OpCos under severe pressure to make savings, don't decide that it should all be centralised.

Andyh82 said:

I often cringe at some of the responses on Twitter by the likes of First

Quite often people asking the question will know more than the person answering?

“Due to road works buses 1 & 2 will not serve stop X”
Does this also effect bus 3, which goes the same way someone will ask
“We are not aware of any change to service 3” will be the response

Someone asked FirstWestYorks if they were still able to use their WYMetro MCard when the 184 changes to the Bee Network

“@Beenetwork will be able to help with this query” was the response

Click to expand...

This sort of thing frustrates me no end! Quite often the reasoning is different depots (Depot Y tweets about their routes 1&2 but gives no consideration to Depot Z's 3 along the same route) which just adds to the confusion level, sadly even if the customer services team are fairly local giving the depot team access to socials is not always useful

Transdev seem to do a much better job than First of publicising disruption and not keeping cancellations a secret.

Metro (the PTE/Combined Authority) used to be really good but of late have dropped the ball a little with very late changes of timetable posters on stops so they still show services that changed route 3 months ago.

The moovit journey planner on their website is not as good as the previous custom offering, in particular it does silly things if you need to change bus at Huddersfield Bus Station often sending you to the next stop rather than staying in the Bus Station.

Well here's how not to do it.

Waiting for a Stagecoach bus. Nothing showing in realtime on Bustimes or the app. No sign of the bus when it was due.

Ask on Twitter if it's running as it's not showing on the app.

The answer - telling me that if it was cancelled at short notice then the app might not have been updated by the "local team".

And telling me indirectly that I'm talking to someone with no clue about what's going on locally.

(The bus then turned up)

AdamWW said:

Well here's how not to do it.

Waiting for a Stagecoach bus. Nothing showing in realtime on Bustimes or the app. No sign of the bus when it was due.

Ask on Twitter if it's running as it's not showing on the app.

The answer - telling me that if it was cancelled at short notice then the app might not have been updated by the "local team".

And telling me indirectly that I'm talking to someone with no clue about what's going on locally.

(The bus then turned up)

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Stagecoach Twitter is run nationally from I believe Scotland for each operation

richw said:

Stagecoach Twitter is run nationally from I believe Scotland for each operation

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It's certainly not local.

On the other hand, I complained to Stagecoach recently by email about what looked like the removal of a day ticket that would result in very large fare increases for groups travelling.

It turns out that they had just phrased the information on the web site badly and I got a prompt answer actually addressing my query and giving a sensible answer (they were just withdrawing one day ticket but retaining another which covered a slightly larger area).

I get the impression that Stagecoach email enquiries are handled locally. I've generally had pretty good responses when I've contacted them.