Customer Satisfaction Among Transit Riders: How Customers Rank the Relative Importance of Various Service Attributes

One of the reasons transit organizations collect customer-satisfaction information is to help set priorities for service improvements. Customer-satisfaction survey results can help managers choose from among a long list of service attributes (e.g., vehicle cleanliness or on-time performance) to more optimally focus their organization’s attention and resources. To make these choices, managers need to know how important each service characteristic is to their customers. Common techniques for gauging the relative importance of various service characteristics to transit customers are examined. Empirical data from the Bay Area Rapid Transit District are used to compare and contrast several of these techniques. The analysis suggests that a relatively simple approach using a ranking of bivariate correlation coefficients from high to low may be the most advantageous technique for ranking the relative importance of transit attributes from a customer perspective.