Customer Service Standards in a MaaS Future

Standards of customer service in the transport industry often make the news. But despite this, definitions of what constitutes good customer experience in the transport industry are in relatively short supply. Between sectors, this is even more of a challenge when comparing the experience of different transport options. This issue will become particularly acute in a future of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) where customers have greater power over these options and will be able to choose from among a whole marketplace of MaaS providers.

Why MaaS is a different customer service proposition

Much work has been put into developing the technical service architecture of MaaS ecosystems. This is a useful starting point in terms of defining where the customer relationships lie, the technologies that support them, and even titling the customer relationship — such as business-to-business or business-to-consumer. To overlay this architecture and to develop understanding of what constitutes good customer service, an understanding of the customer service proposition is required.

The primary shift consists in transferring the primary customer transactional interface from the mobility operator to the MaaS provider. This position as an interface presents two independent but closely related issues for such providers.

MaaS service offerings to customers are as much a product of complex relationship management as they are of financial relationships. Such relationships need to reflect a joint commitment to end-customer benefits as much as they ensure a fair and equitable financial transaction between parties. Contracts and traditional business-to-business relationships will only tackle such an issue to a degree. MaaS providers will be critically dependent upon offering multi-modality as the core of their service offering. Accordingly, simply dropping a mobility operator for poor performance, particularly where that operator offers your customers scale of operation because that is the very nature of their own operation, can seriously damage your service proposition.

The experience of a MaaS product is dependent upon a consistent, high-quality offering by the whole mobility ecosystem. Deep and meaningful engagement is required, not only based on a customer's’ end-to-end journey (critical though it is), but how all parties can benefit from integrating the whole service offering into a person's life. In the world of MaaS, measuring success in meeting lifestyle needs will be the primary indicator of a good quality customer service as operational factors.

Experience across modalities within the transport sector

Current experience across mobility sectors details a mixture of customer services formally adopted, informally adopted, or in some cases not adopted at all. In the U.K. for instance, while the likes of consumer group Transport Focus has undertaken excellent work to understand consumer attitudes, customer service standards vary:

• Automotive: Normal consumer law and laws governing warranty and technical assurance, plus specific guarantees offered by individual OEMs.
• Aviation: Legal requirements for duty of care to air passengers.
• Buses: Defined by individual bus companies.
• Highways: None defined, although Highways England is working on them.
• Maritime: European regulations governing compensation, refunds, and subsistence for stranded passengers. Otherwise, none.
• Rail: Common passenger rights defined by European law, and increasingly with the adoption of Passenger Charters through the U.K.’s rail franchising process.
• Taxis and other Shared-Use Vehicles: Responsibility of specific operators.

It should be noted that the absence of industry-standard definitions does not correlate with customer experience and satisfaction with services. Additionally, there is a notable gap in cross-modal metrics in customer service standards. Thus, a direct comparison between modes of transport is often difficult to establish.

The customer service experience in the transport sector is often defined in an operational sense. These include frequency of service, reliability, cancellations, and even availability of on-board Wi-Fi. These are taken as customer experience measures. Such factors have long-proven links with customer satisfaction, and demand for services. For instance, the National Rail Travel Survey in the U.K. — the results of which are also identified as key performance metrics in many rail franchises — has identified that reliability of service is a critical driver of perceptions of value for money.

The nature of the transport market also means that a customer experience from one organization or mode can also drive the customer experience in other modes or organizations on the same trip. When researching airline alliances, Vikrant Janawade showed that poor services at an interchange airport or from a single airline in the alliance can affect the perception of customer service of other airlines in the alliance. Additionally, customers with such alliances expect the customer service standards of the best airline to be replicated among all airlines, regardless of their distinct operational or business practices.

The digital customer experience

Another challenge that affects MaaS service providers is the confluence of digital customer experience and physical customer experience. Not that this is much of a confluence. Extensive consumer research shows that rather than seeing them as two distinct customer service offerings, consumers in the retail sector expect “the best of both worlds” combined into a single service offering. That is the convenience of the online experience combined with the emotional experience of the physical offering.

Practice relating to incorporating online channels into a single customer service offering has long been established among the best operators in the transport industry. Going online to check times, view live network conditions, and buy tickets is an established consumer practice in many nations. But this is still seen as a distinct offer separate from the operation of services and the network, with interfaces limited to ticketing and live service running. MaaS changes this proposition by utilizing new technologies to bring the physical offering into the digital world.

An increasingly common example of this practice is sentiment mapping, where online channels such as Twitter and Facebook are mined based on geolocation and the content of such posts is analyzed to determine whether a location such as a transport facility has ”good” or ”bad” sentiment. Many transport companies and infrastructure owners have experimented with the application of this technology, with notable examples being Russian company Empatika mapping sentiment at U.S. airports, and the New England Complex Systems Institute mapping Twitter sentiment in the streets of New York City.

The power of such technology is not necessarily through the measurement of customer service, but through integration with MaaS platforms to enable consumer choice based on current and historic customer sentiment. The Transport Systems Catapult in the U.K., in partnership with the U.K. Department for Transport, consumer group Transport Focus, Nottingham University, public transport operator Keolis, and startup Zipabout, mines two years’ worth of Twitter data to map sentiment against each of the 22,500 passenger trains that run on the U.K.’s rail network every day. The result is an indicator of the customer experience of each specific service, available to customers and in the future exploitable by operators and MaaS providers. Imagine planning your journey in real-time so you wait for a train service with a better customer experience than the one currently on the platform in front of you.

A controversial element of digital technologies is the increasing ease for customers to give feedback on a service. There are many scary stories of customers threatening to leave a bad review online because they did not receive a particular service. But current evidence into online reviewing does not give credence to this view. Online customers are far more critical of online reviews than otherwise perceived, and there is evidence that reviewing metrics are being applied by transport organizations in a manner that does not reflect the usefulness of online reviewing.

For instance, take one of Uber’s infamous practices, where drivers who fall below a predetermined satisfactory score out of five are alleged to have been removed from their systems and can no longer drive for them. If this is true, this misinterprets the usefulness of online reviews as shown by research undertaken by the likes of Philipp Klaus into online shopping and Victoria Browning in the hotel sector. While customers are partly influenced by “star ratings”, their perceptions of service are more influenced by the depth of the review, the perceived honesty of the views shared, the tone of the review (ranting is not a good thing, apparently), and the openness of the reviewer. This practice has prompted the likes of Amazon to enable customers to “review the reviewers” by rating which positive and negative comments were the most useful.

Developing a new customer experience framework

In summary, current practices in customer experience standards vary across the transport industry and customer experience is affected by a number of things outside of operators and MaaS providers’ control. New digital technologies allow us to have a new understanding of customer experience and are being used in some cases in ways that do not reflect their usefulness. So what can be done about it in a way that allows customers to assess and choose between operators and MaaS providers through a consistent framework?

As the implications of MaaS and digital technologies on customer experience and developing standards is only now just starting to be understood, developing a robust framework with measurables useful to every person, and one that is not simply a continuation of current practices, is tricky. What this author proposes instead is a set of principles by which such a framework can be developed:

• Customer service standards need to be equally applicable at a mobility ecosystem level as much as they are applicable to individual constituents of that ecosystem. Regardless of where the relationship with the end-customer lies, that customer experiences mobility at a system level, with each part dependent upon the performance of others. Service standards therefore need to be as relevant across every part of the system.
• Measurements of individual components of the mobility ecosystem need to factor in the influence of the ecosystem at large. Developing a robust measure for individual ecosystem components such as MaaS providers needs to reflect the interdependencies which drive its experience. This enables customers to understand the relative performance of each component as well as policy and investments for parts of the ecosystem that need to be improved in customer experience.
• Operation is useful, but sentiment is better. While operational factors do drive customer experience and are easy to measure, they do not reflect the whole story. New technologies and their increasing integration with service providers means incorporating customer sentiment is easier, and gives a more rounded view of the experience of customers that is measurable.
• Feedback on the customer experience of participants builds trust. Ensuring that measures of customer experience in MaaS are robust necessitates building confidence that those reviewing such services are trustworthy and relevant. The scale of surveys partly overcomes this issue, but the depth of feedback requires this trust so that the framework is robust and defendable.
• Personalize. New technologies and platforms allow many service providers to greatly tailor their service offerings based on demographic profiles, but incorporation of emotion is increasingly possible. Providing an ecosystem-level customer service standard that is also tailorable to individuals to support their decision-making is necessary.

MaaS has the potential to completely revolutionize the customer experience of mobility. Getting the basics of operations and the technology right, giving power to customers to make choices that are relevant to them, and developing a trustable framework to assist with these are critical. More of the same is not an option.