After years of delays
and disruptions,
how do you convince
skeptical customers
that things are
getting better?
MAKE THEM A
PROMISE
Introducing Rush Hour Promise
Creating Rush-Hour Promise is hands-down one of my proudest achievements at Metro.
While money-back guarantees aren't a new concept,
Metro's Rush Hour Promise was considered
revolutionary in the transit industry for
two key reasons:
​
1. It was simple and automatic.
2. There was no fine print.
​
First, some background on the challenge Metro needed to solve:
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Decades of underinvestment and inadequate maintenance had led to a system that was--quite literally--falling apart. From tired railcars prone to mechanical failure to track so decayed that slow-speed orders blanketed the map, Metro found itself unable to meet even basic standards of service reliability for its 700,000+ daily riders.
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Returning Metro to a state-of-good repair would take nearly a decade (corresponding with my tenure as chief spokesperson), and would subject weary riders to even more hardship, including shutting down sections of the system for months at a time. There were times when we actually discouraged people from using the system due to capacity constraints during construction.
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Finally, with the completion of SafeTrack (akin to emergency surgery). followed by Paul Wiedefeld's "Back to Good" initiative (akin to post-surgery "diet and exercise"), on-time performance and other key metrics began to rebound.
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Except one: ridership.
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Metro had shed riders each year for 9 years straight, and now--just as the system was emerging from the darkness--found itself in a new world of competition with services like Uber and Lyft.
​
» Washington Post: When it comes to reversing the
ridership slide, Metro's leaders don't have a plan (Sept. 30, 2018)
» Washington Post: They risk squandering this culture of
transit riding: Metro ridership hits a low point (March 10, 2019)
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Metro was struggling to retain the customers it had, much less attract new ones. In the communications shop, we needed a new way to tell skeptical customers something they had heard many times before: 'Things were better, and it was safe to come back.'
​
It was 2017, and Metro had just hit riders with a service disruption so severe that we took an unprecedented step: We announced we would issue a blanket refund to all affected riders.
It was to be a one-time thing, as Metro required its Board's approval for any permanent fare-policy change, but that afternoon, as was working with the technical pros who manage Metro's fare payment systems to find parameters that would isolate the refund to affected customers, I had a question:
"If we're able to run a script to figure out who was delayed and then issue them a refund, what's stopping us from doing this all the time?"
From a functional perspective, the answer was nothing, and I immediately saw an opportunity. Metro already had everything needed to launch a "customer retention" program without incurring capital expense, and from a marketing perspective, it was exactly the kind of bold statement of accountability we needed to cut through the noise.
I began shopping around the idea and found strong support from staff in Metro's Planning department who were already looking into the data on customer behavior following a bad experience. We found that, at a 15-minute delay threshold, a service guarantee would actually pay for itself through customer retention -- to say nothing of the incalculable value of good will and positive PR.
With the business case locked down and buy-in from the CFO, CTO, and COO, we took the proposal to the GM, who loved the idea of demonstrating accountability. We got a green light to take it to the Board, who voted unanimously to approve the program on January 25, 2018.
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Metro began issuing ride credits the next day.
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