Tan Kin Lian's Blog: Refund of bus fares

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Refund of bus fares

hi
I don't understand why must every ezlink card holder goes to MRT station to check if they are entitled to any bus fare refund. Since ezlink office knows which card is entitled to refund, cant they just automatically credit the refund into these affected ezlink cardholders? A simple computer programme can do this job.

Ezlink already over-charge... why make any mistake by troubling every Singaporean ? A waste of productivity! It is not right to donate un-claim $$ to charity. We should demand better service from our service providers. If they make mistake they should refund and compensate us.
JS

7 comments:

Lye Khuen Way said...: Right on ! Not good at IT, but the solution express sounds do-able. Must be some scheming, tight-fisted MBA in LTA/SBS/Transit high flyer's idea of frustrating the masses. Good CSR from one perspective by "donating to charities". Lousy customer relation, if you ask me !; December 30, 2010 9:06 PM
StocksKeeper said...: they learn from our dear govt style.

take money from you very very fast and efficient! but comes to refund, you wait and wait.; December 31, 2010 8:49 AM
Benjamin said...: Dear Mr Tan,

It is sad that LTA did not have the courage to just own up to the initial mistake and make the donation at the time without wasting more time and resources (LTA staff time fielding phone calls from the irate and confused public, setting up of the website portal to allow refunds, public's time to claim the refunds etc) trying to get the money back to the bus commuters, a case of throwing good money after bad. I believe about $300,000 was over-charged which is a sizeable sum. However, the average sum over-charged per person was about 19 cents (from memory). Does LTA seriously think that people would bother to go out of their way to collect an average of 19 cents? For most people who have to travel to collect the small amount, the bus fare would be more than the amount claimed! The bottom 10th percentile might (I am guessing), but the donations would probably be used by this group anyway. From the recent ST report, only $26,000 was collected, or less than 10% of the overcharged sum.

There is always 20/20 vision with hindsight but, it just smells like LTA was following some service recovery guideline blindly without doing a cost-benefit analysis. LTA should have raised their hand in apology, admitted to the mistake and informed the public that it would cost a few times the amount to get the money back to the overcharged commuters. I do not recall reading that any of the LTA senior management has apologised for this fiasco. Events like these (and there have been many this past year) make me wonder why our public sector deserves to be paid as much as they are.

Benjamin Chia; December 31, 2010 9:46 AM
Anonymous said...: the system is build by LTA, not the transport operator.

it is not feasible to refund real time when u board the bus/mrt, the database is huge.

at least they admit their mistake.

give them a break.; December 31, 2010 10:34 AM
Unknown said...: they should learn from skype. with the service disruption, they gave everyone us$1 credited directly into your account by clicking a button and enter your pin. for lta, we are not even talkjing about apologies or compensation, just refunding money to you that they have deducted by mistake.

so u see the diff in pr and service standard. all tie back to the mindset tat they can not say sorry.

tan wa lau; January 01, 2011 7:59 AM
Unknown said...: It took you longer to write this blog post than it would take you to check if you got a refund. If it's so troublesome for you to get your 3 cent refund, then don't bother.; January 01, 2011 4:03 PM
Recruit Ong said...: Freeman wrote:
at least they admit their mistake.

give them a break.

so who give commuters a break?
why is the public always asked to bend backwards and stomach all these screw ups after screw ups? where is the accountability? heads must roll, starting from the transport minister and his political bosses... vote wisely; January 02, 2011 10:48 AM