Communication as a Service to the Customer

MBTA Service Advisory

The MBTA's at it again with their signs. This time they had a template, but still managed to turn an opportunity to communicate with its riders into a  block of blithering text. Even worse is the fact that the text comes roughly from an MBTA press release that was verbose, redundant, and awkwardly phrased to begin with. These posters, which were first sighted Wednesday evening, were posted in few places around Alewife and Park Street stations, including on some blank A-frame sign boards next to another sign with poor body copy. The other signs present at the station posted construction updates on the switch just south of Alewife. (Photos at the bottom of the post.)

General Manager Rich Davey has stated his focus is on safety and customer service, and he reiterated this on a recent visit to Springfield. If he and the MBTA are serious about customer service, it's imperative that they get their act together and work on communicating with their patrons. It was said at the first meeting with the GM over three months ago that the MBTA does not do enough to tell its own story, to advocate for itself, and essentially keep riders informed. However, one would be hard pressed to find improvement in the communications side of customer service if many of those methods communicate very poorly to begin with.

MBTA Constuction Update

I've focused a lot on signs and posters mostly because they're a passion of mine, but also because they are the perfect test for the agency's ability to communicate critical customer service-related information to riders efficiently and conspicuously. A family of four visiting from out of town managed to miss a sign that was right next to them at Park Street. When I asked them their thoughts on the sign, they noted that the reason they didn't notice the sign was because it simply wasn't conspicuous enough. Surely there are better ways of engineering the signs to be more conspicuous than having MBTA crew dress up like the American stereotype for a terrorist and walk around with the signs.

As of this posting, there still isn't a conspicuous notice about the emergency response drill on the main MBTA page and no immediate indication from the main page that such advisories even exist. Further, there is no information available online on the construction updates at Alewife. When all is said and done, the MBTA needs to work on communicating efficiently and clearly, in their signs, press releases, and other communication methods. If they don't, their attempts at informing riders will go unnoticed and the agency will continue to look like a bunch of bureaucrats doing an amateur job of serving the greater Boston area.

As usual, I've included my own revisions below, linked to PDFs of the revisions.

Red Line Project Update - 23 June_blog

Red Line - 27 June_blog

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New Signage Pilot due for next Service Change

After grabbing the attention of some folks on the web and at MassDOT/the MBTA, I’ve set in motion the steps to a better method of alerting fellow riders to upcoming service changes. At a meeting with my contact at the MBTA this past Friday, I handed over the template designs and uncovered a few ugly truths about signage and rider communication at the MBTA. When put to practice, the signs will not be placed within the trains themselves, as I had done the night of 6 May, for ‘union reasons’. Instead, they will likely continue to be deployed as ‘seat drops’, which basically means they’ll end up face-down on the floor under the seats after the morning rush comes in to peel them off the seats. I regret not having pressed harder for a better solution. These signs will also go up in stations, ideally in place of the large vinyl walls of text that have normally accompanied service changes.

Ultimately, all signs now deployed on the T for service changes are currently done line-by-line by each line manager, but this isn’t really news to us. What’s more distressing is that whatever design and brand integrity team that used to exist at the MBTA as part of the public relations team no longer exists, likely due to successive budget cuts and the resultant position eliminations that have happened over the past few decades of federal, state, and municipal disinvestment in transit.

A well enforced brand identity breeds comfort and familiarity and makes it easier for riders to passively spot helpful information, such as line maps, emergency procedures, or wayfinding signage. Splintering of this visual continuity hampers this and makes communicating with passengers much more difficult and energy intensive. The MBTA needs a brand and passenger communications czar; Joe Pesaturo and his team has their hands full with outward-facing communications with news media and internal communications at the MBTA.

In any case, the signs will make their way to the public relations team who will apply their touch to the designs and push them out as a template to the line managers. How it develops from there is up to them, but Josh Robin plans to keep me involved in the project. At the moment, my next step is to create a web app that will allow line managers to create the signs with an intuitive form using drop-down menus and canned statements that have been pre-approved by the public relations team. Anyone interested in contributing his/her web technologies talents should express his/her interest in comments below.