Zane Patterson rides the bus to work every day.
One morning, the project and performance manager for Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority noticed that his usual bus stop on West 25th Street, near Irishtown Bend Park, was incorrectly marked on the map. Services like Google Maps and the Transit app were sending folks to the wrong location.
Patterson reported the issue and quickly resolved it—a direct result of RTA’s new customer experience initiatives, which the agency says are rapidly transforming rider feedback into tangible improvements.
Last December, RTA created a new department focused on improving customer experiences. Nick Biggar, the senior director of customer experience and performance management, said RTA wants to understand and advocate for its customers’ needs.
“We want to make sure that we are walking in the shoes of our customers, so that we get a chance to see, feel, experience everything that comes along with the customer journey,” Biggar said.
‘Going to Gemba’ to review services first-hand
Over the past year, the Customer Experience (CX) department has created several formal strategies to capture customer feedback.
The first is a practice called “going to Gemba.” Gemba is a Japanese term meaning “the actual place.” Developed by Toyota and commonly used in lean manufacturing, going to Gemba encourages decision-makers to go where the work is being done.
The new team is encouraging RTA employees to experience their services as riders. The response, they said, has been overwhelmingly positive. “The buy-in from across the RTA has been phenomenal,” said Biggar.
Some departments now require staff to take up to two Gemba rides each month, meaning they must commute to work by public transit. On these rides, employees fill out an online form that includes a comment box, drop-down menus of all RTA routes, stops and stations, and an opportunity to upload images.
The program launched in June, and the agency has already collected more than 1,300 submissions. The customer experience team meets every Friday to review the findings.
Feedback is generally sorted into two categories: tactical and strategic.
Tactical feedback can be addressed quickly and is usually just a matter of forwarding it to the right people. Among RTA’s 2,500 employees, someone is often available and equipped to quickly resolve reported issues. For example, if someone reports a dirty bus, they simply inform the department responsible for cleaning buses.
Strategic feedback covers long-term challenges that span multiple departments. For these bigger-picture issues, the team steps back to develop project plans.
According to Patterson, a common issue is real-time communication with customers about route changes, delays and more. “There’s a lot of different hands in that,” he said. “It requires a lot more coordination to be able to deliver a result.”
Learning from staff, leaders and riders
Beyond Gemba rides, the customer experience team has explored other ways to capture insights from employees and riders.
Many employees are already daily RTA customers. According to Biggar, they’re amongst the most knowledgeable customers about what is possible to fix. The new Employee Riders Council gives these employees a platform to help RTA determine strategy and priorities. About 30 employees have volunteered to serve on the council.
The team has also experimented with a facilitated exercise called “journey mapping.” They split RTA’s leadership team into small groups and assigned them a fictitious customer persona based on survey data. Each group had to take an RTA trip to a predefined location by a certain time.
“We had to trip-plan, pay, connect, wait, ride through the lens of the persona,” said Biggar. It was a powerful exercise to have RTA leadership ride the system while looking through the lens of specific customers.
Their newest initiative, Customer Listening Posts, launched in September. The team determines a location, and “we set up a booth. We have coffee. We have pastries. And we’re really just interacting with our customers as they come and go,” explained Biggar. The Customer Listening Posts allow riders to share ideas directly with the team answering questions such as: “How was your trip today?” or “If you could fix one thing about the RTA, what would it be?
Cleveland Documenters this summer took note of the role of RTA’s customer experience team and how the agency was focusing on rider satisfaction even as its revenues were falling and it has faced cuts to services.
GO deeper with notes from Documenters Stephanie Manning and Tommy Oddo.
What’s next?
These customer-focused initiatives don’t change the fact that RTA faces financial challenges that will affect its services.
In November, RTA leaders announced plans to reduce services in 2026. The organization spent about $50 million more than it brought in for 2025. The agency will make up the difference by using $40 million from its “rainy day” fund and cutting $10 million in 2026. Starting December 19, Wi-Fi will no longer be available on RTA trains, buses and trolleys. Additional cuts, including service reductions, are expected to roll out over the summer.
According to a press release from Clevelanders for Public Transit, service cuts will devastate lives. “In Cleveland, more than 20% of households have no access to a car. These folks will be hit the hardest,” they wrote. “Yet, we all lose when public transit or other public goods are cut.”
According to Biggar, it’s too early to say how much the customer service department’s initiatives will shape the service cuts. “At this time, we don’t really know how the Gemba stuff might inform that, but it is available information, should we want to access it,” he explained.
Looking ahead, Biggar hopes that their efforts will firmly infuse customer voices into organizational decision-making. When the RTA is making important strategic decisions, “we want customers to have a seat at that table,” he said.
Kimberly Wright, the manager of customer experience and performance management, sees Gemba as an investment in RTA’s future. “This is our business,” she said. “If we don’t invest in it and take care of it, no one will.” Wright believes centering customer voices will increase ridership over time.
Patterson added that the new initiatives don’t just give them hard data to resolve specific issues. It also infuses a culture change in the organization. “People are eager to do their Gemba rides,” he said. “I get to go out and see the fruits of my labor and the people benefiting. I get to see my pride and joy out in the field.”
