South Western Railway Train Cleanliness Survey

[flythetube]

South Western Railway have been sending out emails inviting the recipient to take part in a 12 minute train cleanliness survey.

The Survey is being run by

Cowry Consulting

It involves looking at a number of images or statements and stating one’s perception of whether it’s clean or unclean.

This includes images of full carriages and empty carriages or carpeted non carpeted surfaces.

Includes an image of a number of people seated at table seats along with all their food and drink and you have to state whether this is clean or unclean !!!

This would depend on whether they cleared their table before alighting or just left it there but just seeing them sitting there one is supposed to state clean or unclean!!!!

The first batch of questions require a timed response in fraction of a second and it will say you are too slow!!

Then asks you to click the opposite answer to what you wanted to give !!

Later on there is a long bombardment of agree / disagree statements which you can’t side with after each statement but you have to wait until the end, unfortunately or fortunately I gave up during this bombardment.

I wonder just how many start the survey only to abandon it at some point?

Why do they need a reaction time to answer their questions ?

They want my views on train cleanliness including smells (images of pizza sweaty armpits) I n am not applying to driver the train!!

Not sure if this link works but this is the Survey link (not a link to an article to quote from)!!!

.

 

[Towers]

Do they include images of ‘water features’ inside blown double glazed windows, isolated internal doors and toilets with no bog roll or soap halfway through the day?

Can’t do much about smelly punters, but can do something about fleet maintenance and cleaning.

 

[Craig1122]

There's something called "managing by walking about". I think their senior managers might benefit more from employing that technique. They might then see the stained seats and dirt encrusted interiors of their fleet without the expense of employing a third party consulting firm.

 

[WesternLancer]

South Western Railway have been sending out emails inviting the recipient to take part in a 12 minute train cleanliness survey.

The Survey is being run by

Cowry Consulting

It involves looking at a number of images or statements and stating one’s perception of whether it’s clean or unclean.

This includes images of full carriages and empty carriages or carpeted non carpeted surfaces.

Includes an image of a number of people seated at table seats along with all their food and drink and you have to state whether this is clean or unclean !!!

This would depend on whether they cleared their table before alighting or just left it there but just seeing them sitting there one is supposed to state clean or unclean!!!!

The first batch of questions require a timed response in fraction of a second and it will say you are too slow!!

Then asks you to click the opposite answer to what you wanted to give !!

Later on there is a long bombardment of agree / disagree statements which you can’t side with after each statement but you have to wait until the end, unfortunately or fortunately I gave up during this bombardment.

I wonder just how many start the survey only to abandon it at some point?

Why do they need a reaction time to answer their questions ?

They want my views on train cleanliness including smells (images of pizza sweaty armpits) I n am not applying to driver the train!!

Not sure if this link works but this is the Survey link (not a link to an article to quote from)!!!

.

Sounds exactly like the survey done by Northern with same methodology a few weeks ago which was also discussed on this forum about the same issues / problems (with the survey)

see:

Northerneers Survey Group

I am a member of the Northerneers Survey Group - a group of Northern passengers who are sent a questionnaire about some aspect of the TOC's work every month or so. I found their latest survey about litter extremely annoying and patronising. Anyone else in this group who has done the survey feel...

www.railforums.co.uk

 

[flythetube]

Sounds exactly like the survey done by Northern with same methodology a few weeks ago which was also discussed on this forum about the same issues / problems (with the survey)

see:

Northerneers Survey Group

I am a member of the Northerneers Survey Group - a group of Northern passengers who are sent a questionnaire about some aspect of the TOC's work every month or so. I found their latest survey about litter extremely annoying and patronising. Anyone else in this group who has done the survey feel...

www.railforums.co.uk

Yes, pictures of Lavender, Mint and Lemon, pictures of bins with no lid, bins with lid, coffee spilt on the floor, images of leather, plastic or moquette seating.

Why not just ask in plain English what you want me to answer and no, no images of toilets clean or otherwise and no questions either regarding these unless they appeared later in the Survey.

 

[43096]

There's something called "managing by walking about". I think their senior managers might benefit more from employing that technique. They might then see the stained seats and dirt encrusted interiors of their fleet without the expense of employing a third party consulting firm.

They might also see the graffiti tags on the trains that don’t get removed in a hurry, or the crisis in the fleet that is of their own making.

Such a change from Stagecoach days, when you would regularly see senior people out and about.

 

[Deepgreen]

Thread title badly needs correcting...

 

[flythetube]

Thread title badly needs correcting...

Done!! Fat Finger and typing on mobile on a moving bus.

 

[fgwrich]

Do they include images of ‘water features’ inside blown double glazed windows, isolated internal doors and toilets with no bog roll or soap halfway through the day?

Can’t do much about smelly punters, but can do something about fleet maintenance and cleaning.

Think it's bad now, took a look at one of the refurbished 458s out on test the other day at Basingstoke and they might as well turn those window's into fish tanks...

 

[Towers]

Think it's bad now, took a look at one of the refurbished 458s out on test the other day at Basingstoke and they might as well turn those window's into fish tanks...

Depressing if they’re coming out of refurb like that

 

[Taunton]

Was looking at their trains yesterday. While they have spent significant sims on train washes, these only do the sides, the transition to the filthy, dirt-encrusted ends of each carriage is only too apparent.

If nothing else, why not paint the ends all black - like BR used to do with Mk 1 stock.

It's actually been a good while since I last saw a blown double glazing half-full of water. I do recall a letter somewhere suggesting the railway breed a species of flat goldfish to go in them. An engineer separately suggested such windows could be calibrated to show the g level of the braking, without the need for fancy instruments to do the same.

 

[flythetube]

South Western Railway have been sending out emails inviting the recipient to take part in a 12 minute train cleanliness survey.

The Survey is being run by

Cowry Consulting

It involves looking at a number of images or statements and stating one’s perception of whether it’s clean or unclean.

This includes images of full carriages and empty carriages or carpeted non carpeted surfaces.

Includes an image of a number of people seated at table seats along with all their food and drink and you have to state whether this is clean or unclean !!!

This would depend on whether they cleared their table before alighting or just left it there but just seeing them sitting there one is supposed to state clean or unclean!!!!

The first batch of questions require a timed response in fraction of a second and it will say you are too slow!!

Then asks you to click the opposite answer to what you wanted to give !!

Later on there is a long bombardment of agree / disagree statements which you can’t side with after each statement but you have to wait until the end, unfortunately or fortunately I gave up during this bombardment.

I wonder just how many start the survey only to abandon it at some point?

Why do they need a reaction time to answer their questions ?

They want my views on train cleanliness including smells (images of pizza sweaty armpits) I n am not applying to driver the train!!

Not sure if this link works but this is the Survey link (not a link to an article to quote from)!!!

.

Having contacted the Survey Company, I have just received this response from them.

Thanks for your response and getting in touch. We're working with South Western Rail’s innovation team to help improve customer experience across the South Western network. The survey you've taken part in uses a methodology called an Implicit Response Test, which asks participants to respond very quickly to stimuli to gather their gut reaction. It's a methodology created by Harvard University and has been used and validated in a variety of contexts. A function of the test is asking people to respond quickly, and this can be unfamiliar to a lot of people.

We appreciate your feedback and we aimed to manage people’s expectations up front by explaining the nature of the test and by asking whether people felt comfortable with it. However, we realise that we could have added open ended sections after different exercises so people could expand on their responses.

Whilst some of the sections might not be obvious at the beginning, there are several studies from psychology and sensory neuroscience that have identified the link between certain sensory information (like colours) and perceptions of our surrounding environment (in this case the cleanliness of the train carriage), but all of this happens without our awareness. For example, it has been shown that matte dark surfaces are unconsciously perceived as ‘more dirty’ than shiny and bright regardless of how actually clean they are. These are the associations that we wanted to test, and since these are unconscious in nature, we needed a test that enabled us to capture those responses very quickly without people reflecting too much on their answers.

This is the first time South Western has used this type of research methodology and it is a pilot. As with all pilots, it is a learning exercise and we’ll be using customer feedback to develop our approaches for future IRT testing.

I trust this goes some way to explain why the survey has been psychologically designed the way it is and how we value your time and comments with the timeliness and consideration in our response. If you would like to understand more around the behavioural science techniques we use and why, then drop me a line at REDACTED AS STAFF EMAIL ADDRESS GIVEN HERE.