The overall goal of this project is to enable public-sector transportation agencies to understand and use the needs, wants, and values of their existing and potential customers to make better decisions. Determination of customers' needs may be based on objective research into behavior patterns or on subjective research soliciting the stated opinions or views of customers. Application of these needs into decision making can lead policy development and planning, issue analysis, prioritizing actions, or testing effectiveness. Continuous communication with customers is essential to describe the agency's intended course of direction, its progress on projects and services, and its willingness to receive and incorporate customers' comments and suggestions throughout its processes of developing and implementing everyday, new, or improved products. Transportation and nontransportation agencies in this country and abroad have developed effective actions in customer identification and segmentation, in data gathering about customers, and in application of the information to decision making within the agency. This report is a compendium of many newly fielded approaches that have been analyzed by the methods used and arrayed in outline form to show approaches that are likely to be most useful to agencies and most advanced in terms of technique or innovation, while remaining statistically valid, replicable, and cost-effective. The report is presented in the following nine chapters: (1) A Rationale for Customer Needs Analysis; (2) Customer Grouping and Segmentation; (3) Choice of Data Gathering Techniques; (4) Applying Customer Needs to Decision Making; (5) Nontransportation Best Practices; (6) Transportation Best Practices and Implementation Strategies; (7) Case Studies of Customer Analysis in Agency Work; (8) Guidelines for Practitioners; and (9) The Potential for Information Sharing. (Author/publisher) This report may be accessed by Internet users at http://gulliver.trb.org/publications/nchrp/nchrp_rpt_487.pdf
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