trent barton – ‘the really good bus company’

Customers who travel on trent barton routes are to benefit from an investment of £6 million in new buses this year, despite the economic downturn. The 43 new buses will be rolled out on five routes in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

The routes, or ‘brands’ as they are called by the company, that will get the new buses are The Mickleover which will receive eight Volvo B7RLE buses with Wrightbus Eclipse urban bodies, and the 15 service between Ilkeston, Long Eaton and Sawley which will have a new fleet of six of the same model in March.

In May, the nines route between Sutton-in-Ashfield, Alfreton and Derby will receive 13 new Optare Solo buses to be followed by a further ten Volvo/Eclipse buses appearing on the rainbow 2 service between Ilkeston and Nottingham in July.

Finally, the Calverton Connection brand will get six new Mercedes Citaro buses in August.

The new buses will all have double-glazing as standard, and are wheelchair and buggy friendly. All except the Optare Solos will have air conditioning. The entire order will come with leather seats and trent barton’s designer interior, creating an environment that would normally be associated with a high street coffee shop.

Our regular investment in the fleet has been a contributory factor in winning many awards over the years. Winning awards enhances your reputation, motivates your employees and encourages you to strive for higher standards, but we have to remember that we are in business for one reason and one reason alone – and that is to make a profit. We do that by satisfying and delighting our customers, over and over again, so that they keep coming back and keep telling their friends.

We are in the retail business. We are retailing destinations. We are not selling bus journeys. None of our customers travel with us for the sheer pleasure, excitement or enjoyment of travelling on a bus. They travel with us to get to a destination, whether its their place of work, school, the shops or the pub. Our job is to get them there safely and without any fuss or bother. Most importantly, the journey with us needs to be a better experience than the one that might be offered by our competitors, whether it’s the car, train, bike or on foot – or of course by another bus operator. Quite simply we have to be better than the competition.

Branding

We offer our customers approximately 40 different brands. Each brand has its own distinct market and its own specification. Each has its own team of drivers, its own fleet of buses, and its own fares tariff. Each has a Brand Manager and Team Leader. Each is in essence a micro-business within the main business.

Some of our brands have names, and some have numbers, but each has its own identity. Harlequin links a well-to-do housing estate in Derby with the city centre, while the Spondon Flyer is a fast and frequent link between the village of Spondon and Derby which trades on its speed. Connect is a circular bus route around the housing estates of Hucknall and feeds customers onto the tram to Nottingham and the Keyworth Connection is a link between Nottingham and the commuter village of Keyworth where leather seats, air-conditioning and a coffee shop interior are attracting motorists from their cars.

Today’s consumers buy brands. Strong brands which have built up affection and loyalty over the years are less vulnerable to price competition. On the other hand, weak brands which have no identity or character and have not developed affection and loyalty are highly vulnerable to competitive attack and to consumer resistance when prices are increased.

Building a brand takes time and effort and is all about delivering promises day in, day out. It means under promising and over delivering, getting it right first time every time, and it means consistency. It also means reminding the consumer about the brand identity every time that they come in to contact with it. Our buses carry the brand identity on the inside as well as the outside of the bus, on the timetable leaflet, at the bus stop, on the ticket and wherever else we can put it.

Market research tells us that consumers spend more money on brands that they have a strong relationship with. Our research shows the same thing – frequency of use is highest on our brands that have the strongest identities. As a brand gets stronger and develops loyalty, most of the volume growth tends to come from existing customers travelling more frequently.

Maintaining loyalty to the brand means regularly freshening it up. It is important to never let it go stale or to lose interest in it because customers will notice much sooner than you think and they will soon get bored and move on. It is important to recognise that all brands have a life cycle, and if we don’t refresh, refurbish and relaunch at regular intervals we will soon look tired and old fashioned.

Any retailer will tell you that the customer is king and it’s true. Everything we do, plan to do, change, or alter in any way must involve our customers. Whenever we think about doing something we ask ourselves first of all how it will benefit our customers. The business can only survive if we focus all our attention on our customers and their needs and demands.

Listening to customers

Our customers’ key demands are very simple, and research over the years tells us that their number one demand is punctuality. They want the bus to turn up at the stop at the time that we say it will. That’s not easy when you have to share your ‘track’ with so many other road users and when it’s often out of use at a moment’s notice. So working closely in partnership with the local authorities that control the roads is very important. Friendliness, cleanliness and comfort make up a second tier of customer demands, all of which are well within our gift to deliver.

Customers also want value for money. We mustn’t confuse value for money with cost which is something quite different. Every one of our brands has its own fares tariff and even though the fares on some brands are not cheap, complaints about fares are very rare and prices are always very low down the agenda when we research customer views.

Everything starts with research and we never assume that we know what customers want. We conduct user and non-user surveys, as well as focus groups from time-to-time. Occasionally we carry out the work ourselves, but usually we engage a professional independent agency that we have worked with for many years. Our Brand Managers, Lead Drivers and drivers are also a valuable source of information. They know their customers because they speak to them every day. But we learn most from our unhappy customers, so it is important to make it as easy as possible for people to complain. We want to hear from them because as Bill Gates once said: “your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”.

Training

We are firmly committed to thorough training and re-training of our staff. Training of course starts with recruitment and we are very careful to select the right sort of people. Bus drivers have to like people. They have to be out-going, friendly, smart, polite and tolerant. The ability to drive a large vehicle is secondary to these qualities. It is far easier to train a friendly person to drive a bus than it is to teach a good driver how to be friendly. Our emphasis in the recruitment process is therefore to find what we call ‘people people’ and teach them how to drive buses. Former bus drivers make up a very small proportion of our new recruits as they often do not have the sort of personality that we are looking for.

Empowerment is a key part of our driver training. Teaching drivers to take decisions and to use their initiative when the occasion demands it, even if it means breaking the rules to help a customer, is a consistent thread running through all our training. Breaking rules of course comes much easier to some than others!

One-to-one training is organised with individual drivers in a brand team whenever there is a change to the brand, even if it’s a simple fares change or a timetable alteration, to make sure that they understand the need for the change and can explain it to our customers. We try to avoid the use of notice boards for this purpose as they are far less effective. Besides, if we expect drivers to treat customers as individuals, then it is important that we treat our drivers as individuals as well.

Clean buses

We are obsessive about cleaning. Customers have a fundamental right to expect their buses to be spotless. It is not difficult to achieve, and customers will not forgive bus operators who can’t keep their buses clean.

Every bus is thoroughly cleaned every night, and is swept out at least once during the day. The sweep out during the day is always carried out in front of customers so that they can see us keeping their buses clean.

Our commitment to cleaning and presentation means that we do not allow our buses to be used as mobile advertising hoardings. We spend a lot of money making sure that our buses look smart and attractive, so we do not want adverts plastered all over them. Not only that, but adverts have a habit of fading after they have been through the bus wash a few times and will quite often tear or be left on display long after the advertising campaign has ended. All of this damages the image that we have tried hard to create at no small expense.

Interiors

Our customers do not expect luxury but they do expect a reasonable standard of comfort. We now take much more care over the design and style of the interior saloon. Individual seating rather than bench type seats became the norm many years ago and we are now increasing the seat pitch to give customers more knee room, and on some brands we specify three seats across the aisle rather than four so that they can have a wider seat. Leather seats and air conditioning has become the norm recently and we have double glazing as standard to keep noise levels down and keep windows free of condensation. Our newest buses have wood effect flooring to replicate the interior style of a modern café bar or shop. We keep our fleet as modern as we can, and the average age of the trent barton fleet is currently a shade over five years.

Quality control

‘No quality control – no quality’ is the maxim of most modern production lines. The same goes for bus services. Mystery travellers have been riding on our buses for nearly 20 years and reporting the results to our management team.

A total of 53 items, from the condition of the bus stop and roadside information, to the cleanliness of the bus inside and out, the appearance, attitude and performance of the driver, through to punctuality, and even interior noise levels and rattles are recorded and scored. The reports are circulated to the management team and fed into a database so that we can monitor our performance month-by-month and brand-by-brand. Every audit is discussed with the driver, whether it is good, bad or indifferent. This gives the Brand Manager the chance to congratulate the good, reprimand the bad and coach the indifferent.

Alongside this process, all Directors and Managers in the business are required to carry out a fixed quota of audits on our bus services every month, and circulate a report of each trip. Walking the job in this way makes sure that we are all in touch with our brands and can experience for ourselves the service that our customers experience every day. It is a rare event not to see something which needs to be put right, or something which can be improved or something which triggers an idea. It also keeps everyone on their toes and lets our staff know that the management team is interested in what happens on the road.

Carefully monitoring complaints is also an important element of the quality control process and we select at random one in 10 of our complainants three months after the complaint was resolved to find out if the customer was satisfied with the way that we dealt with the problem and if it has recurred in the meantime.

The top drivers are each rewarded with a cash prize each month and a driver of the month certificate. Each year, the 12 drivers of the month go forward to our celebrity hosted Really Good Service Awards gala dinner where the driver of the year is announced and presented with a trophy and a cheque for £1,000.

We underwrite our commitments to our customers with a no quibble, on the spot, money back guarantee to any customer who is dissatisfied for any reason. Drivers will give customers their money back if they request it. In practice very few customers demand their money back despite the fact that every bus carries details of the guarantee. In fact, drivers offer to give customers their money back more often than it is requested.

To sum up and to bring me back to where I started – making a profit – I can do no better than to quote Henry Ford who said: “A business absolutely devoted to customer service will only have one worry about profits – they will be embarrassingly large”.