Traveller's Ancedote, an open mail to redbus
I have been a regular user of redbus for the past one year and had some annoyances, issues with redbus. I decided to mail them and see what they feel about those issues. I got an impromptu reply from their head of marketing and I am publishing the email publicly just for the benefit of everyone.
Here is my mail followed by their reply.
I have been a regular user of Rebus since last year and hats off to you guys,you guys provide one of the best online booking services I have ever used.As a software engineer myself, providing a usable end product to a customer is always the most difficult rather than the engineering that went to the product.
My experience with red bus usage has extremely good but some buses charge ridiculous amount of money and provide a really bad user experience. I have seen people being maltreated with rude words and the customer scolding red bus for selling shitty tickets. At times the buses are so bad that you don't really know if you will really make it to your final destination.
Even though red bus has very little to do with any of the above, not everyone will understand that its a problem anyone will face when they try to run such a startup.
In summary the common problem I have faced with red bus so far is:
2. Cost/Price of the tickets
I am interested to know how you guys are trying to mitigate the problem, also i have few suggestions
1. Introducing Red bus Certified Program ( Similiar to ratings but not aggregated from the users)
Redbus could tag a bunch of operators based on your own travel experiences and double check with the operators, based on the badge of the travel operator, someone can choose to buy the ticket or not. This is different from ratings as ratings data could be quite tampered by the operator itself. I have travelled in bad buses which had good ratings in redbus site.
2. Introducing something like a Customer grievance cell as a pilot who will present at some of major boarding points and classify the ratings of buses based on customer experiences. This gives a sense of good will to the customer as they have some one to go walk and talk in case he is irritated by the quality of operator during the beginning of travel itself.
1. Changing values in drop downs don't retain the sorted result, kind of annoying
2. Why should booked buses come on the list?(Should'nt the cancel option be more explicit or show a tool tip)
3. An option to say any seat when there are only few seats available as back and forth you don't get to book any of the seats.
Other outstanding annoyances:
Getting an exception page when something goes wrong (/ error in some .aspx page) should not be a problem most of the time but might confuse naive users as redbus involves credit card transactions and as such.
And here is the reply I got from Mayank(Head of marketing)
Thanks for all the insightful feedback and the compliments likewise.
We recognize the issues you've spoken of. The best thing that can be done in the situation we are in is to give our customers the freedom to rate buses and we can in turn make this information available to everyone. We can't certify any single bus because that means guaranteeing a level of service when it's not in our control. We do plan to have a boarding point assistance -something that you mentioned in your mail.
So, to tackle the quality of the buses we have introduced two features - one is the user ratings and the other one is a -ve alert. The bad rated buses are highlighted in red. You can hide them by using a filter above the"ratings" tab. Even if you do select a poor rated bus, we'll alert you that it's been rated badly by other travelers and on the parameters it got rated badly. Hence we ensure that you are taking an informed decision at every step.
We are also in the process of weeding out the really bad service level operators.
On the pricing front, we have a feature that informs customers of high prices. If you search for Diwali tickets, you'll notice that bus operators have hiked fares because of the demand and supply. Very similar to what you see in airlines. Pricing is neither regulated/dictated by redBus nor any government body and every bus operator does so at their own will. Sometimes for good reason and sometimes for profiteering. When they ply buses on some high demand days, they genuinely incur higher costs in terms of taxes so they pass on that additional cost to the customers. Of course, redBus has nothing to do with such pricing. In fact we mark it as a high price so that customers know so.
On the simple improvements you've suggested, point no. 2 - we show sold out buses because many of our customers would like to know if there actually is a 3 PM bus or not. Even if it's sold out, they can use that information for future reference while planning their trip. It's our responsibility to reflect the market, hence we show what's sold out. You can ignore those. We will soon put a filter above the "status" tab to avoid annoyance from sold out buses.
The other improvements you've suggested are being worked on.
I am actually looking forward to meet those guys in person and try understand how they are solving these problems. Its quite challenging indeed.
