What are we doing with all that satisfaction data? Evaluating Public Transport customer satisfaction data collection and analysis techniques

Emphasis on measuring and understanding public transport (PT) users' satisfaction is driven by research that has found that passengers who are satisfied with PT services also often report the intention and desire to use PT in the future. The relationship between overall satisfaction and long-term loyalty is not straightforward and is often indirectly influenced by many factors related to both PT services as well as the characteristics, opinions, and previous experiences of PT users. To increase retention of existing riders requires an understanding of the customer's needs and perspectives of service quality, both for the overall service and for attribute-specific items (e.g., reliability and safety). For that reason, several PT agencies have adopted marketing strategies to elicit knowledge on users to identify the relative influence of these service attributes on a users' overall service assessment. However, the methodologies used to collect and analyze satisfaction data can limit the ability of decision makers to create policies which are not only representative of a population, but also benefit all segments of a population, impacting their effectiveness. This chapter provides a review of the most common practices and approaches to analyzing passenger satisfaction with PT, focusing on prevalent techniques to estimate the relative importance of service quality attributes on overall satisfaction. It critically assesses the advantages and limitations of each method with regards to its ability to be put into practice by PT professionals and translated into policy effective for stimulating loyalty across population segments.