CTA Tattler

I'll believe it when I see it.
"CTA chief of customer communications" must be an easier job than Maytag repairman, since the CTA is clearly engineered to be communication-proof.
My most recent example is just a couple of days old: The timetable signs on the Evanston L platforms are being replaced with new signs which do not give the times of the trains.
Two weeks ago, I had a total of three different people give me at least four different versions of how and when to catch a particular bus at the end of the line where it starts its run.

If Mr. Huberman is serious, he ought to act like a civilian with a problem once in a while, and see how ridiculous his claims sound in the face of the hermetically sealed organization he heads.
"building an interactive relationship" with someone whose identity it takes Sherlock Holmes to find out is absurd.

uh oh neil, now you've done it. Talking bad about anything RonH does sets off these people!

I've talked to the red line manager personally several times and he could pretty well give a &*(& about any problems the riders might have on the red line. In fact I found his "explanations" condescending and quite frankly so thin they wouldn't satisfy a fifth grader.

If there's one thing I can be is persistent and he knows me by name as many ties as I've called. Last time I told him that I didn't think he cared a bit about issues and told him that I wanted my complaint sent up the chain and that was about a month ago. Surprise! I never heard anything back. This just stresses my point about exactly how hollow Rons' mantra about accountability.

Like I also mentioned as a solution (Yes folks, contrary to popular belief I do offer solutions) and it has been an industry standard practice in other places is for an organization to do a little Quality Assurance on its employees about how they interact with customers and if they resolve the issues.

First it tells the employee that brushing off customer concerns is not a good idea and that they are being held accountable (there's that nasty word again) and it makes the customer feel like their concerns are important (something you have a snowballs chance in hell of feeling with the CTA).

As always I'd really enjoy a chance to sit down with Adam and tell him exactly what a crappy job his organization is doing. I'd be glad to pass on any good things as well, but as usual, when I reach to find some, I come up empty.

KevinB

Since Case is the chief of customer communication, & is changing the website, it would nice if he would also change the godawful CTA phone system.
When you call them, the first thing you hear is some canned crap from a woman saying "The system is designed to help you".
Anytime I hear bullshit like that, I know one thing: the system doesn't help me if it's telling me that!
The 888-986-7282 number should only be used for comments & complaints, not for regular CTA business.
The public shouldn't have to go through the ridiculous, long menu they've devised.

"I've talked to the red line manager personally several times and he could pretty well give a &*(& about any problems the riders might have on the red line. In fact I found his "explanations" condescending and quite frankly so thin they wouldn't satisfy a fifth grader."

KevinB, when (general time frame, please) did you speak to the head of the Red Line - the general manager? For the last five years, up until about two weeks ago, the head of the Red Line was Romayne Brown. Any conversation with her, in person or on the phone - would leave no doubt that she is a woman. So, is your beef an extremely old one? or did you have these myriad of conversations in the last two weeks? Just trying to judge the validity of your comments.

You know, someone really needs to hack together a Greasemonkey user script that just zaps KevinB's comments.

no, no, Michael--where would be the fun in that?

I don't think the General Manager is the right position for all this public contact. It's very easy for just a few customers to dominate his whole day, leaving no time to actually do any managing.

Also, if you're already empowering the GM to treat the route(s) they're in charge of as their own domain, you're going to find that the people who are the best at managing also tend to be the most defensive, while the people who are the best at public relations aren't the best managers. And yes, you'll also find that there are some people who aren't very good at either. But your chance of finding someone who's really good at both, who hasn't been recruited away by a better place to work than the CTA is pretty slim.

In an organization with as complex operation requirements as a big city transit agency, an operations manager has to be spending most of their energy on operations, not public relations. What you can do is create a second public relations manager to be paired with each operations manager, but if your intention is more than lip service, that public relations manager needs to have equal rank as the operations manager they're paired with.

Now in an ideal world, the operations manger would work as a team with the public relations manager, but this isn't an ideal world. They need to report to a single person who can resolve disputes. This single person can certainly supervise more than one pair, but they have to have the real power to resolve disputes. Neither the operations mangager nor the public relations manager should have any other people that they report to that they could use as a wedge.

The problem with all this is to impliment such a system, you'd need to hire more managers. And regardless of what lofty goal you're trying to achieve, and regardless of how it could really enhance service, as soon as you start adding management positions, the press and public will object.

Ron can have the best of intentions when trying to find a way to be more responsive to customer comments, but you're not going to get the money to do anything more than hire a couple of lower-paid CSR's to answer the phones. Getting higher-level operations managers involved will take their expertise away from operations to do public relations work they may not be suited for. Hiring people who are suited for public relations, and giving them the authority they need to accomplish anything will be seen as wasteful spending by the short-sighted, cost-cutting mentality of the public.

The best Ron will be able to do is bamboozle people with a line of BS about his intentions, and hope that he has his golden parachute in place by the time he starts being compared to his predecessor(s). The current messiah can only delay being held accountable for not being able to succeed in an area where he has no chance of success. He won't be able to pull this one off.

Hey, johnson. Who are "these people?" You mean those of us who are willing to give someone who's been in charge of the CTA for less than a year a chance before we start judging? How irresponsible of "us."

Anyone else been a "Mystery Shopper"? I've done it twice. We'll give it time to see if the feedback makes a difference.

"If there's one thing I can be is persistent"

We know KevinB. We know.

sorry guys, the man who called me back and I talked to said he was "in charge" of the red line....so, I guess I assumed he actually was.

When I asked to speak to his boss, he said that would be Ron Huberman...so I guess either he lied or I assumed too much from that exchange.

But the point I made about accountability and QA to make sure that complaints are being addressed still stands, maybe even more so with the apparent impersonation of the Red Line GM.

KevinB

Even if the Mystery Shopper data gets sucked into a black hole, it's incredibly cathartic to participate. I had an absolutely heinous bus experience yeserday and it felt great to type the pain away. It's also good to be able to say something positive when appropriate. I do wonder how they're able to deal effectively with the volume of data they're getting.

I don't like the way the mystery shopper website is set up at all.

I'd prefer a system that allows me to save my contact data instead of having to put it in each and every time. Maybe even one that could remember my "favorite" route, or whatever route I ride the most. As it stands, the survey is cumbersome and annoying to do. I filled out about 5 of them and I was very annoyed with having to type my contact info each time.

I was sent, and completed and returned, one Mystery Shopper questionnaire. How do you get to do it a second time?

I can see that the person running the operations shouldn't be burdened with taking calls all day, but why does it seem so difficult to put up a porous membrane instead of a brick wall between the people who take the calls and the people who make the decisions?

It amazes me how many businesses--even those with competition--seem to have trained their Customer Service people that their mission is to convince complainers that everything is actually just fine and they might as well learn to love it, and under no circumstances will management ever be informed that any problem exists, because such a thing is impossible. Even TiVo, that onetime bastion of consumer-friendliness, tried to hand me that line recently. The woman I talked to actually got upset with me because I politely refused to roll over and accept her "that's the way it is" and "you have to..." But I must have accidentally said something right because I finally got handed off to a superior who offered me something resembling the solution I was after, plus a little insight into the company's priorities. I haven't followed throu8gh yet...need to find time to draft a letter to a certain department, then we'll see if some action is taken.

KevinB: Busted.

Are we feeling generous? Shall we give KevinB the benefit of the doubt? Maybe he talked to the guy in charge of rail ops. Sounds like it might have been since the mystery man said RonH was his direct supervisor. Might have been. :)

To do it more than once CC you would have had to have kept that original email you got with the link to the form.

I agree with Dave about the MS form. It's a PITA to fill out--not just having to give it your contact information, but having all the bus routes in alphabetical order. I have to search it every time for the name of the 148 or 146--I never remember what the express buses are called.

What am I busted for? I talked to a guy from the CTA who represented to be something he evidently wasn't. I don't have a CTA org chart.I've got his name at home somewhere and if I can find out where I put it I'll post his name. Maybe he'll be the busted one.

KevinB

Ok, thought I still had it on voicemail. The guys name is Kenneth Hughes, he identified himself as the Red Line Transportation Manager in the voicemail message he left me. (his EXACT words).

I don't know if anyone from the CTA management staff reads this, but he would be a prime candidate for some customer service training....

KevinB

Well, KevinB, at least he called you back...

"If there's one thing I can be is persistent and he knows me by name as many ties as I've called. Last time I told him that I didn't think he cared a bit about issues and told him that I wanted my complaint sent up the chain and that was about a month ago. Surprise! I never heard anything back."

But gotta say, if someone called me a bunch of times, threated to go over my head and demanded that I send his complaint "up the chain", I'd probably brush him off too.

But that's just me. I'm a lousy people person...

I deal with complaints every day. There's a way to handle them and there's a way not to.

It's no skin off my back if someone wants to talk to my boss. I document the situation, see if there is anything I can do to help the person out.

If you feed at the public trough then you are accountable to the people who pay your salary. I explain the situation to my boss and let them talk to the customer. I have a boss who will support me as long as I've done what I can to solve the problem.

The reason I'd never "brush someone off" is that I'm held accountable for my actions, something the CTA seems to be very lacking in...gee, I just made my point again....I know that if I ever did that, I'd probably be written up, I might get a 3 day "vacation" without pay and if it happened enough times, I'd be out on my butt looking for work. But, then again, this is the CTA, they don't have to worry about that....

Oh, and I'm not a people person either, but hey, if that's what it takes to get the job done, I can play one on TV :)

KevinB

Cheryl, I didn't get an e-mail or a link to an online Mystery Shopper form because I didn't give the CTA my e-mail address. My home computer is a few years old and a dial-up connection, so many things people expect me to do on their web sites either take forever or crash the browser. But I don't want to use company e-mail for this. So I gave my mailing address and received hard copy forms. And the materials I received in the mail did not say anything about whether this would be more than a one-time thing. Guess that makes me a mystery shopper, 3rd class.

As long as we're going to rant about "customer service", what really bugs me is the way CSR's are nearly universally trained to express everything with a positive spin.

Simple example...
Me: Can I get that in blue?
CSR: I can get it to you in green!
Me: What about blue?
CSR: Or purple, or red..
Me: How about blue?
CSR: And I can make a report to our design group to let them know that you would like it in blue. So can I get you a green one?

Heaven forbid they simply tell me "no". Saying "no" is against everything they're taught. And it's damned infuriating!

Maybe instead of teaching CSR's how to turn every "no" into a positive reply of some sort, they should spend some time training them to recognise when actually giving a straight answer, even if it's "no", is appropriate.

Rusty, the offer to "make a report to our design group" is actually quite a plus--passing along customer requests and preferences is a concept I've often tried in vain to get across to CSRs. But yes, it's also good not to spin the answer so obviously. The idea of never using the word "no" is rather artificial.

Oh for pete's sake, there are enough substantive things Kevin B says that one can take issue with - why are people focusing on petty non-issues?

Anyhow, I'd just like to second the comment about the phone system needing a "redesign". Quite frankly, I've never been able to tell where the CTA phone system ends and the RTA one begins, but whatever number you call, you're presented with endless menus.

At. the. slowest. pace. conceivable. to. mankind.

The system should offer an "abbreviated prompts" option for people who are basically familiar with the prompts already. My cell phone's voicemail system does this, and it's neat: many of us haven't memorized all the prompts but really don't need to hear a full-sentence description of each option. Hearing a voice rapidly tick off
"automated schedules 1; customer service 2; ...": would be sufficient - and so much faster.

There are ten of thousands of riders on each el line. I don't want the managers trying to 'know' even a tiny fraction the riders, let alone have a 'relationship' with them. That's a recipe for disaster, as pretty soon, the manager is more responsible for so much outreach that she can't do her job of running the line.

They're not managing a coffeeshop. The personal touch isn't what I want from CTA. I just want trains and buses usually on time and notification when they aren't.

I think the kind of round-table that Huberman has had is great, and a similar thing with a handful of riders from each line twice a year along with the line manager would be plenty of interaction. I think that would be very helpful. But let's not go promising riders a wave and a smile from the GM every morning.

Huberman's ideas and willingness to listen are great, so I'm not trying to be too critical, but I think this particular idea is too much of a good thing.

>Even if the Mystery Shopper data gets sucked into a black hole, it's incredibly cathartic to participate.

Wow. If CTA riders were all as easily pleased as Martha, it'd be a no-brainer to clear up all the complaints. Just pull together a massive mystery shopper program, and then have all the reports funnel to a fake e-mail address. No one would ever have to do a thing, but riders would feel incredible catharsis!!

Most of us are looking for the response.

Who said I was easily pleased? I'm looking forward to hearing that the driver of that bus has been drawn and quartered or at least put in stocks in front of the Archer Garage.

Wow Martha, I think we'd get along splendidly!

KevinB

Don't assume, KevinB. U know what happens when u do....

I have actually submitted several "Mystery Shopper" forms. I simply bookmarked the initial form that was sent to me and every time I want to upload a new entry, I just use the bookmark.

While we are asking the government for funding we must be honest and face ourselves as to how good we are doing.

1. Bewtween the first seats for senior citizens and disabled no bars to hold but straps which senior citizens with shaky hands and feeble arms cannot hold and swing back and forth. WE NEED TO INSTALL MORE STEEL BARS TO HOLD.

2. No drinking, eating, and putting feet on the other seats need to be enforced.

3. We are hearing about bus tracking system and real time schedules for buses. Inspite of this we see two or three buses especially routes #93, 151, 155, 36, 4, and 3 chasing after each other.

4. Bus drivers who generally relieve other drivers are late and the regular bus driver has no option but to wait sometimes as many and 15 to 30 minutes. Drivers who are late more that three times in a month should be given a pink slip and chastised and disciplined. If the same behavior prevails for more that twice in a year, these drivers should be suspended if not fied for three months without pay.

5. At the last stops we understand drivers have to sometimes use the restrooms which is ok because we are humans we have such needs. But going to the other drivers and holding a meeting for 10 or 15 minutes and bitching about the management and public should not be allowed as these are the drivers who are usually late and cause two or three buses runing together.

6. Some drivers do not pull close to the curb for seniors or if they do not like any certain minoriies they do not pull to the curb for these minority people. Some times they do not even lower the buses or make them kneel.

7. Shopping carts of huge size make it very difficult for people to move back and forth in the buses the use of such carts should be discouraged. Open baby carriages cause the same problems.

I like to support CTA and RTA but before I suggest any more, I like to see these problems attendedto.

Sincerely, Suleman Nathani,

Illlinois Lottery holds special raffles the tickets are usually $20.00 each. They have four winners for one million dollars each. Four winners for $250,000.00 each, and ten winners for 100,000.00 each. and 100 winners for 1000.oo each. May we at CTA together with Illinois Lottery do such raffle drawings two or more times in a year,it might bring in lot of money. What do you think. Sincerely, Suleman Nathani