Performance, Importance and User Disgruntlement: A Six-Step Method for Measuring Satisfaction with Travel Modes

The technique described in this paper builds on work in the customer service literature on the measurement of customer dissatisfaction to develop a new way of combining measures of performance (how well is this aspect of a service being delivered?) and importance (how important is it to you that this aspect is delivered well?) to give a measure labelled here user disgruntlement. This dissatisfaction measure is plotted against importance to provide a graphic representation of which aspects of service are in most urgent need of improvement. Examples are given from three recent studies conducted by the authors, showing how the technique may be used in the transport domain to compare different aspects of a particular service (e.g., user satisfaction with bus interchange), to compare across modes (e.g., user satisfaction with trips to a leisure location by car and bus), or to compare within a mode across population sub-groups (e.g., younger and older able-bodied pedestrians’ satisfaction with a walking environment)