WASHINGTON — An audit report released by Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General on Monday suggests the company can upgrade its communications with patrons “to improve the customer experience,” but possible steps to do so onboard trains were beyond the scope of the inquiry.
The report, “Opportunities exist to better use data to improve the customer experience” in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, available on the Inspector General’s website, concluded that compared to travel and hospitality industry norms, the company was consistently deficient in timely communicating en-route delays, shortening hold times, and reducing the proportion of abandoned calls.
There was improvement in communicating with ticketed passengers after Amtrak implemented direct-to-cellphone text message advisories about delays in March 2023. But during a two-week period later in the year, the report found, “customers on delayed trains received communications at varying times or sometimes not at all.” Some initial communications to long-distance patrons didn’t occur until “12, 16, and 24 hours after the delays began.”
The average wait time to answer 800-USA-RAIL calls dropped from 9.5 minutes in Fiscal 2022 to 5.5 minutes in 2023, but more than 900,000 of the more than 5½ million calls placed were never answered, and it took call center representatives more than a half hour to answer 200,000 calls.
The report also described improvements in communicating customer service index data back to management and operating crews “in a suite of dashboards to gain insights in their areas of responsibility and identify opportunity for improvement.” One of these was creation of a “feedback loop” to enable operating employees to rectify or at least deal with specific customer complaints, but the IG found weaknesses in those systems.
In Amtrak’s response, an appendix authored by Executive VP of Marketing and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch outlined action plans to address weaknesses, most by the end of December 2024.
I just returned from a round-trip on the Texas Eagle from Temple, TX to El Paso, TX. The onboard crew, as well as the El Paso station agent, did a good job of informing us why the train was delayed.
How many reps do they have? 200,000 calls in a half hour sounds like a lot to me!