INSIDE TRACK
I want to talk about friction points, a term rarely discussed in the bus industry, yet critical to understanding why it is so hard to persuade sceptical non-users to try our products.
It may sound like an engineering term – ‘don’t forget to lubricate the friction points’ – and that is its origin. But customer service experts have adopted the expression to describe any point in the sale process where potential purchasers may give up and go away. When you compare buses with other modes of travel, there are a lot of friction points.
I have always enjoyed using public transport, as do many of my industry colleagues, but we approach it with a good degree of inside knowledge and understanding. Seeing it through the eyes of the uninitiated, it is startling how easy it is to lose faith and give up.
This has been thrown into sharp focus for me because I currently have no car. After getting increasingly bored of driving hundreds of miles a week for the past few years, I decided to go cold turkey for a while and see how easily I can survive without one.
I can, but only because I am willing to persevere, go out of my way to find information, bite my tongue when confronted with unhelpful staff and, abov…
