I would call to order the marketing service planning and business development committee
meeting of the North County District for June 11, 2025.
Is it on?
Before we begin, I would like to inform members of the public who may be viewing the meeting
on the district's YouTube page that in order to make a public comment during the meeting,
You must connect to the meeting using the Zoom link provided on the agenda.
You must also register with the Clerk by sending an email to clerk at NCTD.org.
Clerk at NCTD.org with a name and a phone number and which item you would like to speak
on.
I will ask Taylor Seawee, Deputy Clerk to call the roll.
Committee Chair Martinez.
Committee Member Garcia.
Present.
Committee Member O'Hara.
Present.
Committee Member Joyce.
Present.
This completes the roll.
Committee Chair Martinez, absent.
Taylor will you provide a safety brief and review evacuation procedures?
In case of an emergency, I will dial 911.
In case of an evacuation, please take the stairs, do not use the elevators.
Once cleared of the building, do not reenter unless cleared to do so by emergency personnel.
There are fire extinguishers and first aid kits on each floor of the building.
There is a portable defibrillator on the first floor and staff on hand trained on the CPR
procedures if needed.
This concludes my safety brief.
Thank you.
Taylor, do we have any general public comments today?
No, we do not.
Do we have any remaining...
Do we have any remaining public comments?
No, we don't.
At this time, we would be ending public registration
for general comment.
And before we get into any specific items
on the agenda of this meeting,
I would like to outline meeting protocols
to make this meeting as efficient as possible.
First, please hold your comments and or questions until after the agenda item has been presented.
Second, when the time comes for board members comments or questions,
please raise your hand and I will call on you in the order raised.
The first item on the agenda today is an update on the FY 2025 Marketing and Communications Program
and an overview of the FY26 Program Strategy.
Mary Dover, Chief of Staff, will present this item.
Mary, you have our attention. Thank you committee vice chair Garcia and
members of the committee so we wanted to give you an overview FY25 is not
complete yet what we wanted to give you an overview of what the marketing teams
program has endeavored to do and accomplished for FY25 and then kind of
give you a preview of what the program for FY26 will look like. So in general
the marketing and communications program is an amalgamation of a lot of different
techniques for getting NCTD's name out there,
bolstering our brand and trying to drive ridership.
So we do this through a lot of outreach and events.
We hold press releases, press conferences every once
in a while for new and existing services
that we have stood up and are continuing to do.
We also have a lot of partnerships with, for example,
the Padres and the San Diego County Fair
where we do events with them as well.
We also have a media relations program
where we interact with members of the media
through their inquiries.
Also, we push out press releases to make sure
that the media is aware of things
that are happening at NCTD.
We also have a social media program.
We are present on most major social media platforms
and we've actually revamped our presence on social media.
Typically, we had a very formal and informative voice
and we've tried to maintain that informative voice
but also tapping into a little bit of the fun
of social media as well to try to capture
a broader audience.
And then traditional advertising.
We do advertising for most of our major campaigns,
whether it be Fair Tripper or Padres,
getting people in the community aware
of the services that we provide
and the places that we can take them on our modes.
So in FY25, we were very busy.
This is an overview of all of the things
that we've endeavored to do in FY25.
We launched the NCTD Plus Vista service
where we held a ribbon cutting ceremony
with board member Contreras,
Vista city council member,
and assembly member Davies in the city of Vista.
We were adjacent to the strawberry festival,
so we were really intending to grasp a lot of the public
as well as the media.
We promoted this through our social media channels.
We issued a press release.
It was basically a full court press
to make sure that we were trying to tap
as wide of an audience as possible to promote this service.
We are launched, actually today,
the Fair Tripper special pass
with the San Diego County Fair and MTS.
This gets you discounted admission into the fair,
as well as a round trip transit ticket
and a shuttle from the Solana Beach Station into the fair
to get you right at the doorstep.
Similar, we issued a press release.
There was a media event at the fair
to give the media basically a snapshot
of what the fair is gonna entail and talk to them
about the ways that people can get to the fair
in the most convenient way.
We were at the Oceanside Pride Festival last week
where we launched a Pride Pronto card.
We also partner with the Padres on,
we do advertising promotions.
We have radio spots on Odyssey Radio
and this is really intended to tap into the community
of listeners of Padres fans and make sure that they,
We are a trusted source.
Padre, the Friar Faithful is connected with us
and understands that we are a trusted
transportation partner of the Padres.
We participated in Sandex Bike Anywhere Day
to remind the public that they can bring bikes on our modes
and give them best practices for how to best put their bikes
on our trains and buses.
We were present in the Escondido Veterans Day Parade
last year.
We had a beautiful flag wrapped bus
NCTD employees walked with the bus in the Escondido Veterans Day Festival.
We plan to be there next year if you'll invite us back.
We also launched contactless payment.
This was a way to make sure that riders could have a more convenient way to ride our modes.
Just tap your credit card.
On the validators, the conductor can also tap your credit card so that if you're running
late, you can just run onto the train and it's an easier way to pay.
The Holiday Express event is also incredibly important for us to be put a good face out into the community.
We put on this event every year. We're planning to do it again this year.
It was incredibly successful. We had over 9,000 tickets sold, and it's an incredibly family-friendly event.
We really put a good face out for NCTD. This carries into regular transit ridership throughout the year as well.
And then we have a variety of free ride days.
In particular, we celebrated Rosa Parks on a free ride day on February 4th.
So this translated into comparatively industry-wide, pretty good marketing numbers.
We, through our advertising campaigns, we reached over 23 million.
We had 23 million impressions, and we reached over 10 million viewers,
individual viewers.
We had over 3 million video views.
Our click-through rate on Google was between 24% and 35%.
Our engagement rate on YouTube was between 36% and 53%.
Our completion rate on streaming platforms was 96% to 98%.
And then, this is actually a really important metric, too, that the cost of to making sure
that we are putting our dollars to good places and for good use, we had a $0.03 to $0.54
cost per completed view or cost per completed click.
So, we are putting the tax dollars in the best place and the fair revenue to make sure
that we're effectively managing our marketing platform.
On social media as well, I had mentioned that we're leaning into more of social media trends
and we're trying to engage a wider audience and really build our following so that we
can, you'll recognize our director of service planning, Katie Persons, and one of those,
it didn't make it into this slide because we just did it, but if you follow us on Instagram,
We did a conductor fit check where we had a couple of conductors.
Right?
I'll spare Katie but you can watch it on our Instagram.
So we really, we want to make sure that we get that trending audio on these videos as
well and we want to make sure that we are leaning into the trends so that we can show
up on people's for you pages and the algorithm can be maximized to make sure that our page
is getting across to a wider audience.
posts have done incredibly well in terms of likes and impressions. So we're
really seeing a good trend and it's just continuing to grow. But we also want to
make sure that we're maintaining the informational piece of our social media
as well. We are a public agency and so it's incredibly important for us to get
information out to the public through all of our channels. So we do ridership
and event promotions as well. We wanted to promote taking the sprinter and the
a breeze to the cake event at front wave on October 5th.
I think that's the boots in the park for the coaster.
We promoted the coaster 30th event.
We also did an informational campaign
on how to put your bike on a breeze.
And then down there in the right corner
is a teaser for the holiday express event as well.
So we're managing both voices on social media
to make sure that we're conveying information effectively
and also trying to reach a broader audience.
And the response has been good.
We've seen social media growth.
We've seen a 20% increase in our Instagram followers
and a 53% increase in Instagram impressions.
We're also utilizing LinkedIn more.
It's not just for hiring purposes.
We wanna get information out there to the industry
to make sure that they are connected with us as an agency.
So we've seen a 152% increase in LinkedIn engagement
and a 222% increase in link clicks in LinkedIn.
So this is, if we post our press release
and there's a link to that in the LinkedIn post.
This reflects how often people click those links.
And the whole reason why we're doing this
is to drive ridership increase
and make sure that we are effectively marketing our services
so that people will feel more comfortable riding them
and understanding what we do
and who we, and the services that we provide.
So from, this is obviously not directly attributed
to the marketing, but I can say that.
So from FY23 to FY24, we saw an 8% increase
in ridership as a whole.
For the San Diego County Fair,
just to compare two metrics there,
the fair season in FY23 compared to FY24,
we saw a 6.1% increase in ridership.
And then during Padre season,
2023 compared to 2024,
we saw a 7.7% increase in weekday
average ridership as well.
Part of our marketing program in partnership
with the customer experience department
is going out to schools, meeting people where they are
to promote the youth opportunity pass,
make sure that we are verifying those accounts as well.
And through those efforts,
we've seen 2,000 plus new youth opportunity passes
issued and or verified.
Also through our fair tripper promotion,
we've seen 183% increase in fair tripper passes sold
since we started the combined pass in 2022.
So looking ahead into FY26,
We're going to continue all of the things that we're doing.
We're also going to tailor our,
particularly advertising efforts.
We see sustained growth in Padres ridership.
And so we might utilize our resources differently in FY26,
because we've built that ridership base.
Those people understand that they can take
the coaster to Padres games.
So based off of data that we'll receive
at the close of this Padres season,
we might be able to shift some of our advertising dollars
over to different campaigns.
In particular, promoting the Sprinter more.
Promoting, taking the Sprinter to front wave
in a more meaningful way with advertising dollars behind it.
We're obviously gonna continue promoting Comic-Con,
take the coaster to Comic-Con,
take the coaster to the Delmar Races
with our Pony Express Pass,
which is similar to the Fair Tripper.
We're gonna continue to do Holiday Express.
We're gonna continue to do the things
that we know work really well.
We're gonna increase our engagement with the community
We were at the Carlsbad Village Fair.
Wherever we can get into any of your cities,
any of your farm markets, we plan to be there,
continuing what works and expanding
on where we see opportunities.
And with that, I'll take any questions.
Taylor, do we have any public comments for this item?
No, we do not.
Wonderful.
At this time, we close the public registration
to speak on this item.
Are there any questions or comments from committee members?
Please raise your hand.
I recognize you.
A great report, and I love all the trends, a couple of, you know, as someone who manages
marketing for my own company, you know, things that are interesting to me that I think are
the devils in the details, right?
I noticed like on page one when I went through everything, I was actually, I thought this
packet was maybe really big.
I noticed we were talking about honoring our first black female train engineer, and we
had a picture of a bus with, I don't see her in this picture.
And so —
Sorry.
That was a — the screenshot was just of the title.
So below that, the photo that they actually included in the article is of Crystal in front
of a train.
Okay.
That's good to hear.
I was just kind of like, those are the details that can bring this program that's doing really
well over the top, right?
And then the range on the 3 cents to 54 cents on the cost per completed click, is that because
it spread out over multiple, because it would be a little more close together if it was
each.
Right, so I pulled data from our Fair Tripper campaign from last year as well as our Padres
campaign from last year, and I also pulled data from all of the different mediums in
in which we place advertisements.
So Facebook and YouTube.
So some of them are,
we utilize different mediums for different purposes.
So although the cost per click or completed view
might be a little bit higher on YouTube
or streaming services, for example,
which is typically where we see it,
we know that that's a captive audience.
And for the most part, they're there watching our ad,
they're absorbing our information.
So although the cost might be a little bit more
for those platforms,
we do still see the benefit in terms of metrics there.
And just out of curiosity, I love how we're integrating
the personality of the brand.
And I'm curious, I think 378 is the highest,
what's our highest follow, like, click,
whatever that we've had so far?
I do think that Katie's video was one of the highest.
Yeah.
I can get that number for you.
What our highest liked video is, yeah.
I think it was, I think it was.
Wow, we've got a celebrity in our midst.
We do cover around our highest performing in terms of likes
are typically in the high 300 range.
Yeah, and it was a big shout out to the marketing team
because I think historically the agency's process
as it related to social media and other things
was to be largely informative.
And I think as we've continued to see some generational shifts
in our ridership, we really want to appeal to all users.
And we're seeing a lot of other agencies
and a lot of even privatized companies really hone in
on how they're using their brand
to really take it back to the user
and have employees involved in that.
And that's a new direction for us
and I'm very happy to see them go that direction.
That's something that we've needed for a while, so.
And then kind of had a question.
You know, when you, growth is awesome.
So obviously this is doing really healthy.
I'm always cautious when I see only percentages
or only number, right?
Because if we have one and we go to two,
it's a huge increase, right?
So I'm just curious when I was looking
at like social media growth
and some of the other numbers that are on here,
we had some really great numbers
and they're gonna be good no matter what.
Do we actually have the numbers available to us as to like,
how often do they click prior now?
We're up like a 100, 220 percent on the link clicks.
How many, how often did they click?
And obviously you can push it out to what it is now,
but what is that?
Because if it's, again, if it's two
and we're doing five now, well, that's great,
but if maybe we're, if it's 10,000 and now we're doing 20,
that's even, that's incredible, right?
Yeah.
So we didn't start at a very high place.
So any percentage of growth is good.
But so for Instagram in particular,
the 26% increase represents over 5,000 new followers.
And then on LinkedIn, the post, the links clicks,
that's 8,000 new clicks.
That's great.
Fantastic.
And then my last question, sorry.
I know you said we had a 2000 increase of the youth pass,
I'm probably not gonna say this right,
the youth opportunity pass.
No, 2000 new, oh, that is right.
Okay, 2000 new, how are we distributing those,
and how often are those 2000 used?
And I'm only asking to make sure that a lot of times
if you give out a thousand new passes,
it's not actually them volunteering
saying I want to use the NCTD services
versus like we gave out 2,000 passes.
Yeah.
Is that, I'm sorry.
Yeah, so Alicia, you'll hear from next.
Okay.
Her team at the, in the customer experience department.
Yeah, so Alicia actually and her team
are going into the schools.
So they're talking to students.
I agree, it is different when we're at a fair or something
and we're just kind of handing them out,
but it is a verification process.
So we take their picture, we take down their information.
It is an involved process for the student.
We can get data on the usage of those passes.
We have seen increases in youth ridership across all of our modes and consistent since
the youth opportunity pass started.
So we're making a concerted effort.
They're out there, they're giving the passes.
They're also engaging with the student to make sure they're aware of the routes that
they can take.
Often it is at a school and so we talk to, hey, you can take XYZ route from the school
to wherever you need to go.
I love it, and then the, I guess the follow up to that,
or part of it is, second part is,
are we connecting with our youth opportunity pass people
to find out if we are, in fact,
obviously they're on Instagram, but I know they're,
I'm the only one in the room on Facebook, probably still.
I have a Facebook.
I'll give you my MySpace account.
I still have a MySpace profile.
I don't have my MySpace.
I would still be on MySpace if I remembered my password.
No, but are we looking at, like,
hey, does it make sense for us to start exploring, like,
TikTok now or something that they're using that we're not
currently engaged in? What is the future that we're looking at?
Is that what we're looking for or elsewhere?
Yeah, we're looking at, also,
other social media platforms that we're not on to.
on to I know that blue sky is making a resurgence and tick-tock as well we
haven't waded into those platforms yet but it's definitely on our radar.
It's great news today. I appreciate the report again, great job.
Any other questions? Any hands raised? Oh I hereby recognize.
Joe is a fun chair.
thank you so much for the report. Appreciate the comments from my colleague
here too. I just had a couple of first a comment I saw our members at Pride and
that was awesome they were representing full-on so that was great and it was a
really great festival. I guess my so my suggestion for like kind of growing the
audience over this next year is it's a lot about partnering with locals who are
already have the microphone and lots of them have experience on our buses or on our coasters
and can tell their story with us, I think they would be thrilled to get back in that
way. I haven't talked to anyone specifically, but I know this is a big public service thing
and a lot of those groups that do podcasts locally, like there's a local Padres podcast
that runs out of Oceanside.
There's a number of people that would love to partner.
So doing some cool cross-posting would
be a way to kind of expand the influence for sure.
We also have a lot of local filmmakers
that would do shorts if we worked with them
to get youth opportunity pass holders
to tell their story about why it's been life-changing
to have access to this past that they can now
access the rest of our city or even other cities nearby. So I would just
encourage and I'm offering any support and connecting with with those folks
across the different platforms so I'd be happy to support that. One event that I
think is really special to Oceanside and North County is we have a really big
Tía Desuertos festival in Oceanside and I think that could be I know we have the
holiday train that goes coaster. I think that feels like a sprinter like ride.
A Dia de los Muertos sprinter ride would be like very unique. I think it'd be super
fun and something that our community would get into. So I'm not trying to throw
any work on anybody, but like in future dreaming that sounds like something that
would be it's very special. Yeah and we have participated in the Dia de los
Smartos festival in the past and we plan to do that again this year. We also plan
to just in general celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. Part of it is we're
really leaning into the commemorative celebrations throughout the year.
Obviously we're not focusing our celebration of each of these communities
just within that month but using it as an opportunity to connect with those
communities and make sure that they feel like they're reflected in the ridership
Absolutely because they're reflected in our employees and our ridership and so I
love that deliberate focus it's great. And then I loved that front wave was in
there because they're gonna continue to drive a lot of ridership on as long as
we work with them. I don't know if there's any comment on how that
partnerships going or there could be I know it's kind of ongoing. It's
happening. It's going a little bit slow. Their first year they really wanted to
focus their energy on bringing people to front wave. The construction was not
necessarily fully baked out by the time they opened up front wave so all the way
down the drop down to the front of the hill where we had had some conversation
about maybe moving some passengers kind of got halted by that. The plan I think
for the year once we get into 26 and they've kind of gone through their full
season like right now we're still doing strike force football once I think when
we get back around a clipper season, the conversation is really going to be around, do we need to
augment some bus service to get people to the top of the hill? Because it is a little
bit of a...
It's a hike.
A little bit of a hike from the Sprinter station.
It's a hike.
Katie.
But it's a good opportunity for us, not only from getting riders to Front Wave, but from
the partnership between Front Wave and the agency. And, you know, I think, Mary touched
a little bit, but, and I appreciate those comments because one of the things that I've done in a
past life that I think we want to do here and we're doing here is once we've established a good
social media presence and presence in the community, we want to start to highlight the
communities. We want to use our platform to say, hey, these are things that are happening in your
communities. Here's local business. Here are people who are affected by public transit.
Tell your story. Tell us your story. Let us tell your story. Local agencies that are doing great
nonprofit work we want to tell their stories. Really that connectivity between how people
are utilizing transit to get around in their communities is kind of the driver for what we
want and the team has really built a really good plan to get us there. I think the first phase of
that for us was we had to start to build the presence right out the gate. The front way piece
is really interesting because I think it provides us a lot of opportunity to not only get people to
the arena but be inside the arena. You know, we have some marketing opportunities I think to be
right there front and center, you know on the scoreboard or in other places where people can
recognize our brand for the soccer games or for football. We might be able to have a
advertisement along the wall so I mean there's a plenty of really good opportunity there and
there's a lot of good space now that they've completed the parking lot in the back for us
to have conversations about some augmented transit service along that road. I got season tickets to
everything over there. So, walking up that hill is a lot. That's awesome. The property
that is on the other side, so on the other side of Oceanside Boulevard is going through
another redevelopment change too, so I don't know if there are opportunities for getting
folks staged there. I don't know. Getting across those some boulevard just sucks. It's
not good so even though there's even the hill but like getting across the six
lane freeway it's not it's intimidating for everybody so yeah getting from that
station just to get across the street is is a as a chore especially at the peak
yes but they're directing traffic down there it's difficult for pedestrians to
get across especially on heavy game night yeah so we need to take a look and
how we can solve that problem. Okay thank you. Another partnership possible is we
have the GO side transit that covers a large portion of our coastal area and
we're trying to get it expanded to even more areas telling people that story
about how they can use that to get to our service to move around the county
would be another idea too. Yeah I'm not sure if there's a and we need to chat
them up because I think historically people think we're competing with them
and we're not and the idea behind that is is it's almost a last mile connection
absolutely it's like why wouldn't we want to try to find space for them at
the Transit Center or try to joint locate some of this stuff because we
have a lot of people that get the Oceanside Transit Center and they need to
move from there and that's a perfect opportunity to do that if I'm not on the
101 or if I'm not on mission all the way out on the three like there's just plenty of opportunities for us to
Partner with them and we'll we'll reach out. Yeah, we've met with
Michelle on the city team to talk about the go side shuttle. So yeah, that's it's an evolving partnership. Awesome. It's great to hear
That's it I'm just it's exciting it's a great time to be on this committee. Yeah. Thank you, chair. Oh
to board member Joyce's comment, I think you can do an amazing podcast, an amazing podcast,
NCDD branded, and just interview staff, interview writers, interview people that do and don't use
it and various things, and just that doesn't have to be agenda oriented, get on the bus,
get on the train, it could be actually be just these are the people in your neighborhood,
and I think it would be incredible. So we didn't want to spill the beans, but that's in the works.
we're doing some floor reconstruction here in the building and part of that
floor reconstruction is to have a podcast room so to be partially in the
building but also a roadshow so we want to do like you know and it doesn't
necessarily have to be transit we want to talk we want to talk local foodie we
want to talk you know local politics that matter that's a transit not like
big-time politics but like you know like these are the things that are happening
at your councils that matter to your neighborhood and this is how this is how
they sort of roll into transit and here's how you can have your voice heard and really
talk about the system and why we do the things we do and the history of it. You know, people
always get a kick out of that stuff and so it's common. We're waiting on our building
to be finished on its reconstruction and then we're gonna jump right into that.
It's a low barrier entry so it's a great idea and it probably means we're getting a new
board room too. This is really exciting.
I wish we were getting a new board room. Actually, one idea that got floated was the board room
who might have to move down to OTC
because we may need this room for our OCC, but.
That's way off of this one, yeah, I know.
Can we put that on the agenda?
Yeah, the good news is that yeah.
Yeah, we'll put it on the podcast
about where the boardroom's going.
All right, any other comments?
Beautiful, yeah, it was great.
Couple of things.
Dia de los Muertos, awesome.
we have a huge one in Escondido.
So if we have that connection just between Escondido
and Oceanside, plus there's some in the middle, right?
It's like, oh, I think that would be so awesome
to be able to do so.
I just wanted to piggyback on that.
Usually my experience has been quite negative
on the Sprinter, right?
Every time I get on it breaks down and I have to walk home.
No, I'm just kidding, not walk home.
We may have some positive updates on that in July.
This one I am legally bound to not say anything about,
but I can tell you that if it works out the way
we just had our meeting in Sacramento last week,
it will set the tone for the future of Sprinter,
and we're pretty excited about that.
That is awesome.
But something positive that I like to share,
and my other responsibility, my full-time job,
I'm a church pastor, and I actually sat down in my church
here in Carlsbad across somebody.
We were having lunch.
I hadn't seen him for a number of years.
And he's a person who has gone through a number of surgeries
and had his walker like my friend here has.
And so he just wanted to share with me
unknown that I was on this board,
how in VISTA, he used to have to walk,
mind you disabled, 45 minutes to catch the bus,
the first bus to be able to get anywhere.
But he said, you know, pastor, it's so different now.
I can go places and it's wonderful
and I'm figuring out how the system works.
So thank you to everyone.
Thank you.
You're making an impact directly onto the community
and those that need the transportation.
So positive comment.
I just wanted to share that with you.
I told him, I'm gonna share that on my next meeting.
So I wanted to share that.
Social media response awesome into the millions.
I get excited when I get, you know, two, three, 5,000,
you know, so, you know, now all of a sudden
I'm like 23 million, oh, okay, I still have a while
to get there, probably never will.
So anyway, awesome, thank you, a great job doing that.
I also wanna mention about the YOP usage.
I think it would be good to get metrics
on how many are actually using that.
So I can tell you that right now,
if you want to know what those numbers are.
Yeah, that'd be great.
In 2022, our youth ridership was 98,514.
In 2023, it was 863,880.
And in 2024, it was 1,074,540.
Okay, so those are awesome numbers.
So what that gives us is exactly what we've been talking
about is educating the next generation
and to feel comfortable riding the bus.
And I see at Orange Glen High School,
hundreds and hundreds of the students getting on
and getting off those buses.
So anyway, thank you so much.
That's awesome.
I think those metrics are important for us
to keep an eye out.
Regarding being out in the community, thank you.
Social media, awesome, everything.
but pressing hands, kissing babies, hugging people
is great, right?
And that's what we specialize at.
So just, I don't know if this could work out or not,
but when I'm at the Escondido Street Fair,
I'm there as a council member.
I'm not running for office.
I'm there as a council member.
And I have forms, I have things that help the city.
As a board member, I would be happy to have any forms,
any information, chat about if you have a banner
you wanna put up and we can answer questions,
shake hands, let people know what we offer.
I think pretty much any of us would be happy to do that.
So something to consider our fair.
This last time we had a third Sunday of May,
third Sunday of October.
It's completely revamped because grand has been,
Phase two has been completed and for seven and a half hours,
I wasn't able to sit down because people were just walking
by and talking to people and sharing.
And literally I couldn't, I wasn't able to sit down and boy,
I was just, my feet hurt and it was one of those,
like you're sore, like, oh, this feels bad and good
at the same time.
That's the way I felt.
So keep the Escondido fair in mind
because we're having a major resurgence as to how many people
are attending.
And I don't know if you were there.
I didn't have a chance to even leave my home.
We will look at October, see if we can be there.
Awesome.
Yeah, and I would say the reverse on that, too,
if there's anything that we can show up for.
I know that I personally, and I know Mary's team,
has had conversations with several counselors
throughout our entire service area
and have said, if you need us at a community
meeting to have a conversation about something. We'll be there. Just tell us
where you need us. Um, if you want us to hold a small meeting to have a
conversation about certain services or whatever it is, we work with several of
the school districts. In fact, Katie and I have had conversations with, um, two
or three, uh, Oceanside Vista. Um, you know, a few other school districts is
to talk about service in general, how we can help out. So if you see an
opportunity for us to be somewhere that you think we should be? Just let us know.
We'll show up. We're more than happy to answer questions. If you fill the room
up, that doesn't make me uncomfortable. I'll answer the question. I won't get too
nervous. We'll make it work. It would be great to hear Sean speak Spanish. I'm
working on that. All right. Anything else? Wonderful. Then we'll move on to item
agenda number two. The next item on the agenda will be an update on trends and
and observations from customer feedback received to date.
Alicia Pete Watson, Director of Customer Experience
and Mary Dover, Chief of Staff, will present this item.
Alicia, you have our attention, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you board members.
We are going to be reviewing the customer service trends
that we've seen this year,
so fiscal year 25 compared to last year.
We're starting off with some good news.
These are our compliments by department.
Comparing our fiscal year to last year,
compliments for this year are trending higher
when we look at last year.
This is specifically due to more compliments
for our breeze operators.
This is a, I don't know what you would call this,
but a visual of all of our feedback received this year,
broken by department.
It's important to note that our reporting methodology
is department-based instead of mode-based,
and that's to ensure that we are not unfairly attributing
feedback that is not directly related
to the service operations of a particular mode.
Good example is, right, there's graffiti on coaster,
graffiti removal is not handled
by the coaster operations team.
So we would see higher complaints for,
or feedback for coaster if that were the case.
Total FY25 feedback, we've had 1,604.
It's roughly 67% of that are specific to modal operations.
The remaining 535 are divvied out
between our right-of-way and maintenance-of-way department,
our security, customer service facilities,
and service planning department,
and then to a lesser extent safety,
a small portion of feedback.
This is our customer feedback weighted by mode.
So we weight this modal by ridership,
and we have a rolling look back
to Q3 through Q3 of this year.
So Q3 of last year through this year.
So you can see where we are trending.
On this screen, I believe everything
is trending down except for our coaster
and Lyft, which are slightly above.
All right, so customer feedback comes in a variety of topics.
From that, we bucket the core of the complaint
into what we call core categories.
These are the definitions, there are 10 of them.
And within those 10 core categories,
we have several subcodes,
which essentially refine the core category more.
So in facilities, you could have anywhere
from graffiti removals to station cleanliness
to electrical issues, to plumbing issues and so on.
And when we report out, we report out on core category,
versus subcode.
So this is system-wide.
This is looking at all of our departments across the agency.
This is a look back of core category.
And then the slide on the right is going to be by subcode.
So system-wide feedback is trending slightly higher
this year when compared to last year.
This is primarily due to service-related complaints,
some security concerns and facilities issues.
also seen a lot more service planning requests,
people requesting service,
which is when we look at all the departments
has seen the most growth, which is great.
We love that.
Conversely, there are reductions in operator behavior
and equipment issues, which is also great.
Operator behavior trending down is a good thing.
Broken out by mode, breeze,
When we compare core category and subcode this year,
it's trending lower than where we were last year
when we look at quarter over quarter.
Majority of that feedback received
is regarding service issues and operator behavior.
Our top five subcodes, which is in that screen on the left,
are primarily the same year over year,
and that's service pass-bys, service late,
operator rude behavior, and operator dangerous driving.
So misstop request is another one as well, which is service.
Coaster feedback is training slightly higher than last year.
This is due to more feedback regarding capacity issues.
So with the increase in ridership,
we've received a lot of feedback with people concerned
that the trains are fuller
than they had normally been used to seeing them.
We also have more feedback regarding rude conductors
and the timeliness of our service,
either it's early or late.
Moving into Sprinter.
Sprinter feedback is trending higher.
Quarter over quarter when we compare to FY24,
the increase is also due to capacity concerns
and service cancellations,
which are related to mechanical issues.
Lift customer feedback is trending lower in FY25
than last year and that is with 161 customer feedback reports to last year at 192, majority
of the feedback received is due to reservationists and or dispatch as well as late service flex.
This is so I'll preface by saying we expanded our flex service this past June with the addition
of the coaster connection.
We've added several flex routes,
and so it is expected to see this increase.
It is higher than where we were last year
because we've picked up service as well.
With the feedback for FY25 being majority service late pass
or left passenger, it makes up close to half
of the feedback we've received this year.
And Mary will take it over.
So thank you Alicia for the overview. So what the key piece of the customer experience department is taking in all that feedback and then working with the modes, service planning, all the other departments to figure out how we can mitigate and improve on some of the feedback that we've received.
So, a couple areas where the customer experience team works with the modal operations on doing that, they conduct monthly meetings with our bus operations and our rail operations to go over the feedback that we've received, and work through ways that we could improve that.
Whether it's if it's operator behavior, it's coaching a particular operator, they're also out at the various divisions conducting trainings as well to make sure that everybody in the operation is familiarized with our customer experience standards.
We conduct community outreach also to meet the public where
they are, get some of that feedback,
and then have those conversations with the public.
We do, part of receiving a customer,
piece of customer feedback is determining
whether it's substantiated or not.
Sometimes there is something that is perceived by a customer
that might not necessarily be what we can actually validate.
So when we're out in the community
and we're having that conversation with the public,
we can kind of mitigate some of that right there,
whether it's just educating the public
or providing them with information
on how to utilize our services
and what they need to look out for, things like that.
Part of that, again, is going out onto the school campuses
and talking with the youth.
Some of these instances are,
when we talk about customer feedback that's substantiated,
sometimes it's something that's out
of the operator's control, right?
If there's other unruly passengers,
that might warrant somebody to provide feedback to NCTD.
So when we're out at the community,
when we're out at these schools,
we're talking about the rules of our writing
and how we can make the writing experience better
for everybody on board.
So that's a continued focus
for the customer experience department.
You see that in some of the decreases in feedback in general
and some of, sorry, some of the increases in compliments,
particularly for breeze operators.
It's really Alicia's team and the modal operations
going through training with the operators
and working on ways to mitigate these,
the increase in feedback in the future.
We also expect NCTD is bringing our bus operations
in-house on June 29th.
We're incredibly excited to do that.
That'll just provide another layer of oversight
where the customer experience team and NCTD as a whole
can be more in control of the operator coaching,
operator training to make sure that we have a set standard
for all of our mobile operations.
They're all in-house.
We have a little bit greater control
over the customer experience.
And with that, we'll take questions.
This was a receive-and-update feedback, trends and initiatives.
Thank you, Alicia and Mary, for the presentation.
Taylor, do we have any public comments?
No, we do not.
Wonderful.
At this time, we're ending public registration
to speak on this item.
Are there any questions from committee members?
Please raise your hand.
Yeah, I think it was a great report.
You know, I think there's a lot of variables that
go in a report like this.
you know, ridership, flex of transportation modes
and changing routes and things that, for me,
don't make the numbers,
unless there's something drastically off in there
and there didn't appear to be as important as what I heard,
which is really important is all the things we're doing
and how we're using these numbers.
And I think that's the best thing I heard.
It's the best part of this whole thing
is to hear that we aren't just collecting the numbers
so we can show them to people.
We're actually acting on it.
And that's what I heard.
And I think that's a great response by NCTD.
So great report, and I applaud the work you're doing.
Yeah, one of the things I think is interesting
is when we talk about them internally,
I don't think it's lost on us that I think,
on one of the slides, one of the more frequent comments
we got totaled 250 over the year.
In comparison to the rides that we do,
it is an infinitesimal number.
But for us, it's not about the percentage of customers
that contact us.
In fact, in some cases, we want more outreach.
We would prefer they contact us more and provide us
that feedback because that's really
what helps us drive some of the things that
are happening in the system, especially
in terms of cleanliness or safety at the stations.
Like, even if they seem kind of anomalous,
we want people to call us and give us that feedback
because we can mobilize people to go out and sort of bench
I think you see that from some of our customer service outreach teams that that feedback
is super important to us and in some cases it's 10 comments a year, 10 comments a quarter.
Sure we want to see a decrease in the issue, but we want to see an increase in the feedback
because the feedback really helps us sort of drive how we're able to better the service.
So definitely appreciate the comments.
I think also we've moved away, we've moved away from this, I don't, we didn't touch on this, but this idea of complaints, and changed that name to customer feedback because to Sean's point, we need to know what's happening out there and our writers are wonderful advocates for our system, and we want their
they're the ones that are out there every day writing it and using it and so I
don't want us to get caught up in you know these increases because like to
service planning those are fantastic. It was a lot of people advocating for I'd
love if we could expand service here or there or have we explored adding a new
bus route in South Vista. That's great. We want to see those increases and in
customer experience we encourage that and every time we deliver our response
months back, we thank them for offering the feedback because we don't ever want someone
to feel scared or unsure about saying, hey, I saw something, and I'm reporting it now.
We want to encourage that behavior. That's good.
Wonderful. And I had my stepdaughter, I put her on the sprinter for the first time in
my life. And I was more nervous than she was. And, you know, I parked there and well, let's
wait in the car for the sprint to arrive. And, you know, people start arriving. This
is Escondido Transit, right, which has had its issues over the years. But I must say
that she got on. It was great to see a security team come around. I don't know if they got
on or not. But it just felt nice. And I haven't mentioned this but prior to today. But the
sense, the feeling at the transit center in Escondido has improved. It looks a lot nicer.
It feels nicer. It feels cleaner. It feels safer. And I'm beginning to get that now from
the community, from the riders. So thank you for what you're doing and that customer feedback.
I love that change versus complaints.
So anyway, just wanted to share that.
I have customer feedback that I'll give a little later
because it's not on the agenda.
But anyway, it's great, thank you so much
for all the work that you're doing.
I distinctly remember, I always tell Mary this story,
and Lori always remembers it too because she was there.
But I remember during the interview process
when I said, yeah, I visited the Escondido Transit Center,
and you said, did you visit it at night?
And I said, no.
And I literally went back that day
and went down there at night and wrote down 10 observations
that I thought we needed to change over there.
And the team has absolutely done some phenomenal work.
And a lot of it's just presence.
And thanks to the board, when we did our budget last year,
we increased the security budget almost $750,000
so that we had 24-hour presence
at three of our major transit centers
and a roaming team that hits Vista and a few other places.
And that was by design to really kind of,
I don't want to say retake the platform,
but let people know that we're there.
And I think that's helped out a lot,
so I always appreciate that feedback.
Yeah, sorry, just to add again, right,
I think it's also just our presence in general
in the community.
Alicia and her team are out there.
Lida and the marketing team are out in the community,
the security team.
we're activating our transit centers more,
we're connecting with the community more,
and it's really great work, I think, across the district.
I'll tell the customer experience and the marketing team,
because they're in my house,
but just district in general,
I think we're out in the community more.
It's, we are putting a face, it's humanizing the agency,
it's humanizing our services,
and I think that trends to
a better customer experience as well.
Yeah, our facilities team has done phenomenal work too.
I think through the customer feedback module,
we've been able to mobilize our facilities team
little differently in terms of things that are happening in real time versus
more, you know, we're probably way less than a 24 hour turnaround. You know, we
used to get some feedback or it would come through and it would take us 12
hour 12 24 hours to kind of react to that. Now it's almost happening in real
time because we're able to take those that customer feedback differently in
the system now, get it right out to our facilities teams and they're mobilizing
right away to get out and sort of solve those problems. So it's that's a big
The idea for us, if it looks like a real transit center and it looks clean and it looks like
we're supposed to be there, then people will treat it that way.
And we've seen a lot of success from that.
I would continue to encourage that our security team and staff to be ambassadors for us.
As they smile and they interact with the community, with the riders, the riders feel a lot more
comfortable.
matter of, you know, I'm here to intimidate everybody and make sure you behave.
But I'm here to answer your questions, too, to help you out.
And I've seen that.
And thank you so much, because all these changes happening are making an impact on our community.
Any other questions?
Wonderful.
Well, this item doesn't require a vote.
It was strictly informational.
And our next regular board meeting is June 26, 2025 at 2 p.m. here at this location,
810 Mission Avenue here in Escondido.
And not having any other thing to say?
Oceanside.
Did I say Escondido?
Oh, no.
We can do a roadshow.
We'll take it on the road.
Happy to do it in Escondido.
That happened to me at church.
I was at Escondido at the church, my church there for 13 years.
So I go to my new church in Oceanside,
and for about three years, I kept on saying,
here, welcome to Escondido.
So I thought that wasn't going to happen today,
but oh, well, I apologize for that.
The meeting will be here in Oceanside, June 26, 2025,
at 2 PM.
Thank you.
Our meeting is adjourned.