In November Metro won the Customer Service Team of the Year Award at the National Bus Industry Awards in London.
Judges for the category praised the training given to Metro staff handling public enquiries and complaints, and the effective way its MetroLine call centre deals with over 800,000 calls a year. In the busiest month, December, MetroLine answered 61,346 calls which was 93% of calls received. Eighty-four per cent of these calls were answered in 30 seconds.
Another winner was Metro’s work to speed up the production of updated information for West Yorkshire’s 5,000 stops and shelters with display cases which scooped the Technology category of the National Transport Awards in July.
Knowing that passengers value service information at stops very highly, Metro developed an automated system to produce new displays coinciding with bus service changes, which take place on six dates each year. By integrating its bus stop database with newly developed production software, Metro was able to increase the production rate for displays from 40 a day manually, to 100 per hour automatically, a massive improvement.
Interchange displays, which include a local area map featuring nearby bus stops and local places of interest and a detailed table of destinations reachable via bus services serving nearby stops, have also been improved using Metro’s Geographical Information System and digital mapping.
Use of Metro’s satellite-linked, ‘yournextbus’ real-time bus information system continued to grow and in February 2007, the millionth text was sent in response to a passenger enquiry.
Comments received by Metro from yournextbus users include:
- "I think the service is a very good idea and I use it a lot."
- "It transforms the process of catching a bus. Congratulations to you all!"
- "The service has made a real difference to my daily commute; I am more likely to use the bus because of it. It is really fantastic."
West Yorkshire’s passengers are now also starting to benefit from Metro’s installation of electronic visual displays at key bus stops and shelters.
After hitting one million at the beginning of 2006, numbers of pages of information delivered by the Metro web site continued to rise and have now settled about 1.5 million per month. A review and update of the site is planned.
In February Metro was awarded Approved Centre Status from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS). Metro has three qualified assessors and a number of active coaches, as well as a large number of practitioners working towards an ICS Professional Award. Achieving Approved Centre Status clearly shows Metro’s ongoing commitment to delivering first class customer service at all levels.
