The User Advocate

Yesterday and this morning the BART system had a failure, one far more severe than the other.  The different comments from the users (the commuters stranded on the platform) showed the different perceptions of the two outages.  Yesterday the delay was over an hour and a half, and the grumbling from the commuters was significant.  Many people were upset and not afraid of sharing that.  Today, few people mentioned it.  Why?

Communication and recovery time.

Yesterday, there was only sporadic mention of how soon the trains would be running again.  Today, there was an announcement every few minutes with precise data on the next train’s arrival time.  Yesterday a sign showed a train due in 23 minutes – and that was when the system finally admitted there was going to be another train – and trains came 8-10 minutes apart.  The signs only showed one train in the queue… you never knew when the train after the next would arrive.  Today, the signs were showing the normal couple of trains and how fast they were coming.

How to fix it?  At least do damage control.  When you have a bunch of commuters stuck in the system, make a token gesture to say ‘thanks for waiting.’  If they suffer through the delay, make their trip free at the exit turnstile.  If they need to call home to tell their spouse they will be late or if they want to take alternate transportation, let them out of the underground station and reset their card without charging them the exorbitant round-trip fee.

Show that you understand you destroyed an hour of their lives and feel sorry.  Don’t behave as an aloof monopoly, or you’ll drive people back into their cars.

Technorati Tags: BART, public+relations, user+advocacy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 11:32 am and is filed under News, Potential improvements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.