Provide Daily Control Center Report to Public

Problem, Classification, and Idea

Speaking to anyone about what to improve at SEPTA, one almost always brings up “poor communication” as one of the greatest challenges facing the agency. While there are a number of factors that impact this, perhaps the largest relates to operational delays and/or missed trips. While providing this information to customers might not be able to improve the service for customers, it could make great strides towards improving communications and increasing overall customer satisfaction.

Implementation

SEPTA’s Control Center currently publishes a daily report summarizing any incidents occurring throughout the SEPTA system in addition to any abnormal causes for delays. This information makes some factors understandable to end users, such as that a bus broke down or an operator was sick, causing their trip to be missed. In addition, some situations such as onboard passenger emergencies are not known until after the fact. By providing this information in summary form to customers, the agency is able to increase accountability, transparency, and customer satisfaction by means of providing an answer to the question of “why?” (a question asked more than 2700 times per the past year of Veritas reports).

In terms of distribution, the easiest way would be to simply upload the current report to the masses on the SEPTA website. However, the use of a SEPTA microsite would likely make the entire operation much more attractive to riders. Integrating this with a delay verification page would also make the site great for customers who rely on SEPTA to get them to and from work on a daily basis.
 

Next Steps

• Speak with Jim Fox about possibility of implementing this both in the current PDF form as well as a new sort of “MySEPTADashboard” where customers could monitor if their train is delayed as well as why it is delayed.
• Run a survey to determine whether or not customers would be more satisfied with this information being released (i.e. will the release of this information improve Customer Service)?