By Kellie Melleady
Customer Experience Lead
The conversation around standardization in transit is gaining momentum.
The Federal Transit Administration’s recent Request for Information on Family-Friendly Transit brought renewed attention to how agencies measure the customer experience. Among the public comments submitted, several agencies raised a similar idea: the industry would benefit from more standardized customer experience surveys and the ability to benchmark results against peers.
It’s an idea that makes a lot of sense. But it also raises an important question: If every transit agency used the exact same survey tomorrow, would we actually have apples-to-apples data?
The answer: Not necessarily.
Asking the Same Questions Is Only the Beginning
A standardized survey instrument can create consistency in what agencies ask, but meaningful benchmarking requires consistency in how those answers are collected, measured, and interpreted.
Consider two agencies that ask customers the exact same question about overall satisfaction.
One conducts an onboard intercept survey twice a year. Another distributes a QR code throughout the system year-round. One surveys only fixed-route customers, while another combines bus, rail, paratransit, and on-demand customers. One receives responses primarily from frequent customers, while another weights its data to better reflect overall ridership.
Both agencies may report a customer satisfaction score, but are those scores truly comparable?
This is why the conversation around standardization needs to extend beyond the survey instrument itself.
Sampling methodology, survey administration, timing, modes included, response scales, weighting, KPI definitions, analysis, and reporting can all influence the story the data tells.
Standardization Doesn’t Have to Mean One-Size-Fits-All
Every transit agency is different.
A large multimodal system serving a major metropolitan area shouldn’t be expected to measure every aspect of its customer experience exactly the same way as a smaller agency operating primarily fixed-route bus service.
Nor should standardization prevent agencies from asking questions that reflect their own strategic priorities, communities, or emerging challenges.
Instead, the opportunity may be to establish a standardized core.
A common set of questions, definitions, and methodological principles could provide the consistency necessary for meaningful peer benchmarking, while leaving room for agencies to customize portions of their research.
That balance could give agencies something the industry has historically struggled to achieve: the ability to understand not only “How are we doing?” but also “How are we doing compared with agencies like us?”
Why Stop at Customer Experience?
The same conversation is worth having around Employee Engagement.
Transit agencies depend on thousands of employees to deliver the experience customers ultimately receive. Operators, maintenance teams, dispatchers, customer service representatives, supervisors, and administrative staff all influence how an agency performs.
Yet employee engagement is often measured differently from organization to organization… if it is measured consistently at all.
What could agencies learn if there were greater consistency around how the transit industry measures areas such as trust, communication, recognition, feedback, role clarity, resources, and overall engagement?
The goal wouldn’t be to create a competition over who has the highest engagement score. It would be to give leaders context.
A 70% engagement score means something internally. Understanding how that compares with similar transit organizations, and which specific elements distinguish higher-performing organizations, can make that number significantly more actionable.
There is also a larger connection worth exploring.
Employee experience doesn’t stay inside the organization. Employees deliver the service. That service shapes the customer experience. And over time, those customer experiences influence how the broader community perceives and values its transit system.
Employee Engagement → Customer Experience → Community Value
These measures are often studied independently, but together they can provide leadership with a much more complete picture of organizational performance.
From Measurement to Management
Ultimately, standardization shouldn’t be about creating more surveys or more reporting requirements.
It should be about making the information agencies already collect more useful.
When measures are consistent enough to compare, agencies can identify meaningful peer groups, understand where they outperform, recognize where they may be falling behind, learn from organizations getting better results, and track whether improvement efforts are actually changing the experience.
The industry doesn’t necessarily need every transit agency to measure everything exactly the same way. But we do need enough consistency that when two agencies compare results, we know we’re actually comparing the same thing.
That is where standardization has the potential to move from simply improving measurement to improving performance.
Contact Kellie Mellady to discuss data survey collection for your organization.
