Maintaining service quality First Student
Every school day we transport 4 million children across the United States and Canada. We invest heavily in improving the delivery of our services and ensuring customer satisfaction. Our contract retention rate of 97% reflects positively on our effort.
Our customer satisfaction surveys indicate that safety, driver behaviour and reliability are the issues of greatest concern to our customers and we therefore continue to develop our driver training programmes.
Investing in the safety and security of our passengers
In addition to comprehensive training in safety, injury prevention and defensive driving, our drivers are trained to manage issues that are specific to the school bus industry. For example, drivers and attendants have been trained in the recognition and prevention of bullying and sexual harassment, and in assisting passengers with special needs. We invest $6 million annually in driver training.
Over the past 12 months supplemental training material has been developed to help drivers reduce the passenger incidents resulting from vehicle manoeuvres. In addition, new training material on passenger management has been introduced to help reduce injuries stemming from misconduct.
Our drivers and attendants must pass a physical performance and dexterity test to establish whether they meet the physical requirements of the job for both routine and emergency situations. Extensive background checks are conducted on all employees over and above those required by any state regulations.
Within our commitment to passenger safety we have invested over $6 million in the installation of child and theft alarms on First Student buses.
Improving our services
We are also focusing on improving our maintenance standards and vehicles to improve reliability.
- Twelve months ago we started a programme of training our technicians to the highest standards in automotive maintenance through the Automotive Services Excellence programme.
- We aim to lead the industry in innovative technology. Our investment in an electronic fleet management system and GPS vehicle tracking allow us to further improve the safety, reliability and management of our services.
- During the last 6 years we have invested $540 million in new vehicles and the investment programme continues.
We will continue to work on increasing passenger satisfaction levels and will address concerns raised in our surveys. We are currently looking at defining company wide standards of service delivery to be cascaded down through the organisation.