Comment from Simplify Transit LLC

SimplifyTransit enthusiastically supports FTA's development of an industry standard for evaluating, assessing, reporting and analyzing customer experience and service quality to help the industry more accurately measure and monitor improvements. We would highly recommend that FTA's standards build on or extend existing and emerging transit data standards such as GTFS-schedule, GTFS-realtime, TODS (granular specifics about operational assets, personnel, and service to support Areas #1-3), and TIDES (especially for Area #5). MobilityData stewards these data standards, and there are various other companies and large agencies (especially MBTA) advancing them. We hope FTA will gather input on specific survey questions and methodology from transit agencies with robust Customer Experience programs (the APTA Marketing, Communications and Customer Experience Committee would be a great resource). Aligning with the current state of the art as much as possible will allow better benchmarking and historical analysis, rather than starting from scratch. We aren't experts in customer surveying, but we also suspect there's value to be gained from incorporating best practices, key performance indicators, and survey methodologies from outside the transit industry. Besides surveying of current transit customers, we would encourage FTA to promote market research methodologies and standards that help transit agencies understand the perceptions of their services in the community, identify high-potential market segments, and highlight opportunities to increase demand for their services. Rather that issuing an unfunded mandate, we would encourage FTA to provide funding to support whatever customer research, reporting, and analysis it asks transit agencies to pursue. Many methodologies are labor-intensive, and need to be contracted out to specialized research vendors to ensure the results are reliable. Finally, given that public transit often serves people who are least advantaged in our society, we encourage FTA to provide explicit guidance and standards to ensure that no customers are excluded from customer experience or market research. Survey methodologies need to be ADA accessible and multilingual, or there is a risk that they don't accurately reflect the experiences and perceptions of an agency's customers. About SimplifyTransit: SimplifyTransit offers transit-centric Software as a Service products that help transit agencies of all sizes and modes improve the customer experience. We believe strongly in the value of data standards in the transit industry, as they allow us to offer high quality, interoperable products at reasonable prices any agency can afford. Our Alerts product supports publishing GTFS-realtime Service Alerts, part of Area #4. We are also developing new CRM and Service products that will help transit agencies better manage customer relationships, streamline customer support, and unify various streams of customer input for more efficient and insightful analysis. The more standardized that customer input can be, the better we can unify the data for our customers. We would be very happy to build features based on an FTA standard. We would be happy to provide clarifications or further information about anything above, and we applaud FTA for this initiative.