In many aspects of life we wonder how we compare to others, but our assessments are usually inherently subjective. The Coach Industry is no different, with some suppliers self styled premium service suppliers and others self styled value for money suppliers. We decided to take a statistically objective look at our coach hire service with the launch on June 1 of our ‘Rate your coach hire’ tool. This tool automatically generates an email to our customers 24 hours after their coach hire trip with an electronic link into our system. The link asks the straightforward question please rate your coach hire service – 1=very poor, 2=poor, 3=average, 4=good, 5 very good. Whilst a lot our customers want to make subjective comments we are looking primarily for an objective rating between 1 and 5. The service rated our own in house service on an equal basis with that of our operating partners.
The results were more reafirming than out and out surprising. Some of the highlights from the first 1000 jobs were the following:
Overall our service was rated 3.8 by our customers -better than average and just under good – about right given our market position.
Some of our partners scored higher than ourselves. The range of ratings for service partners was quite varied – showing that coach hire is not a commodity but a differentiated service. Surprisingly the link between the higher price suppliers and the higher service ratings was less clear.
>As anyone who has ever worked in logistics knows these surveys are usually pleasantly surprising. In logistics you hear 98% of the time from the 2% of the customers who believe they have issues. Its always pleasant to be reminded that most people are happy with their coach hire.
How many Customers are Really Unhappy
In addition to an average score we thought we would also publish how many of our customers rated us as 1 out of 5 – implying a high level of customer dissatisfaction. For the last 1000 trips this is currently running at 0.6 %.
DAVE FALLON
Rosie King
