Transit agencies, including commuter rail service providers, rely on systemwide customer satisfaction surveys to measure the quality of service so that they can still offer added value to the service they provide and remain competitive to preserve or grow ridership. In return, information gathered those surveys help agencies formulate solutions to increase user satisfaction and prioritize investments to avoid unnecessary expenditures to improve service attributes that have a limited or no impact on user satisfaction. In addition, measuring customer satisfaction over time helps determine changes in priorities and user perception, and evaluate the effectiveness of past investments.
However, many efforts aimed to capture service quality and its determinants fall short in extracting the full potential of invaluable information provided by these large scale surveys by just focusing on descriptive statistics of overall ratings or relying on hastily performed analyses.
This project aims to document, assess, and enhance the methods used by major commuter rail service providers to determine service quality and its determinants. The study will further examine the existing customer satisfaction survey datasets from Metra and six other peer agencies to identify the determinants of overall satisfaction ratings using with the help of more rigorous statistical techniques, conduct importance-performance analysis, and investigate the consistency of
the results across key market segments.
Various market segmentation criteria, such as transit dependency, trip purpose, customer tenure, or geography, will be employed to gain a deeper understanding of the variations in customer satisfaction and the underlying drivers of service quality across different market segments.
Based on the findings, the project team will develop recommendations for best practices in conducting a comprehensive and meaningful analysis of customer satisfaction survey data to define effective and prioritized strategies for maintaining and improving commuter rail rider experience. The study’s outcome can also inform the survey design process, enabling better alignment of survey content with key determinants of service quality and objectives of the recommended analysis approach.