Time to tell Citybus what you think of them!

Having to do a bit of catching up after the internet problems I was having at the end of last week. I was going to post this at the end of last week.

Plymouth Citybus and your Customer Charter

Plymouth Citybus has always respected and valued its loyal customers and we have enormous pride when you tell us time and again that you will only travel with us and will wait for our buses to come rather than get on anyone else’s bus. We see you standing in the rain and waiting and we appreciate your commitment and passion. We are really excited therefore to be able to ask you all to get involved in our Plymouth Citybus Customer Charter, which is going to be our working formal declaration and promise to you all for our relationship going forwards.

Here are just a few of the benefits of us working together to design our joint customer charter:

• Introduce and reinforce the Citybus Company values and help them to come alive for the customer and our internal teams
• Ensure internal and external customers understand the expected standards of service
• Ensure commitment from the internal and external customers due to individual involvement in the design of the charter.
• Show a transparency to the Citybus team of the future customer objectives from and for the business
• Show a transparency to the customer and stakeholders of the future customer objectives from and for the business
• Provide possible training and development needs which could be directly related back to the business
• Provide standards of service for rewards and recognition
• Show Plymouth Citybus as an Employer of Choice
• Provide an ongoing check list for customer service as it will be a living document
• Improve communication for our internal and external customers

We call our team members our internal customers because we work together internally within the business, but treat each other as our customers, with respect, humour, understanding and patience. We are holding a number of focus groups for our internal and external customers as we can only have a viable, realistic and workable Customer Charter after hearing from you about what you feel it should contain.

A Customer Services Charter is a living document that sets out an organisations aims and promises of service to their customers. It should be developed by both the internal and external customer so that everyone feels part of the process and everyone then can fully embrace the standards and expectations. Customer Service Charters are traditionally written for the external customer but it would be interesting to see if it was possible for the Plymouth Citybus charter to be written for all customers, internal and external.

We have a few questions below if you would like to contribute and of course we would love to hear from you if you would like to attend one of our focus groups.

1. What customer service have you seen and experienced that you would like to see more of?
2. What are the standards of customer service that are vital to you?
3. What do you want from your local bus service?
4. What would you like to share with us that would help us write our customer charter?

Please send all suggestions for the above to chat@plymouthbus.co.uk If you would like to join one of our focus groups please add this to your e-mail and we will be in contact with you. We look forward to keeping you updated as to our progress.

Source pdf

I know that these sort of announcements are always greeted with a certain amount of sarcasm and suspicion but hopefully this is a serious intent to make the passenger central to the business – as they should be. I look forward to hearing what you think of this – I am sure there will be plenty to say! I am sure many of you will also be happy to let Citybus themselves know what you think.

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