Better Trains, Happier Customers
To assess how the NS is doing the company surveyed 45,200 passengers. The Ministry of Infrastructure makes use of these figures to assess how the NS is doing. Last year the carrier was required to get at least 74 percent approval from customers.
80% of NS customers have given the service an approval rating of 7 or above in the past. Last year customer feedback bumped that number up to 86%. More and more people are loving the service and being vocal about these feelings. Thijs Urlings, of customer satisfaction at NS, said the ratings exceeded expectations. This volume of customer responses is the largest since 2004, during which only 60% of customers rated them.
What Is NS Being Judged On?
Think of all the things you wouldn’t want to find on the train.
Customers were satisfied with the friendliness of the train staff. This is a great thing for NS, proving their staff are great with people and know their stuff. This marked an increase from 91 to 92 percent approval. According to the NS, that is also the best judgment since they began surveying.
More travelers were also positive about the hygiene in NS trains. This percentage rose from 62 to 68%. Trains without weird liquid on the floor or bubblegum directly on the seat ?.
NS and Punctuality
Okay, so we know the train has wifi, great! Many expats probably still think this is a perk. It’s not just “wifi in de train” that services the customer’s needs, it goes beyond ProRail’s solar initiatives as well. Punctuality, yes, this is something we imagine NS workers probably get tattooed, it matters that much. It’s such a core value of NS that feedback on this really is at the heart of the survey.
Trains in the Netherlands have never been as punctual as last year, reported track manager ProRail at the beginning of this year. 91.4% of the travelers arrived on time, in 2017 that share was still 90.5%.
Trains also stopped less frequently than in 2017. The number of major failures fell by 10 percent from 627 to 558. In the last five years, the number of technical malfunctions has decreased by 20 percent. Customers saw less disruption due to maintenance on the track. Remember, always be safe around trains, they arrive on time because they move at very high speeds.
As the old saying goes “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Keep doing you NS.
There’s absolutely nothing to complain about Dutch rail service. Try riding a train in the US sometime, if you can find one, where schedules, minimal as they are, are frequently the product of aspirational thinking rather than rail reality.