In the world of public transportation, the passenger should always be the priority.
Operators and authorities are continuously striving to deliver transport services that offer an excellent experience to their customers. This commitment to enhancing the passenger experience encompasses various aspects, including adapting service timetables, optimizing operations for improved speed and reliability, taking an innovative approach to vehicles, and digitizing operations and services.
Besides composable platforms, one crucial aspect is the importance of real-time data in shaping a user-centric mobility experience. When vehicles and systems are able to communicate rapidly and efficiently, a truly integrated travel experience comes to life and each user becomes more autonomous and empowered to act. Travel experience is therefore streamlined to the maximum extent, immediately translating into a much more satisfied audience.
Why Mobility Experience is Important
Starting from the concept of Customer Experience, CX programs play a vital role in ensuring customer satisfaction. In this view, most transport providers employ satisfaction monitoring programs to ensure passengers receive a positive experience and address any challenges that may arise.
Mobility operators, in particular those approaching Mobility as a Service (MaaS), know they have to put the customer at the heart of their business.
This customer-centric approach involves considering the impact of every decision on the customer, covering the whole traveler journey from travel planning, passing through ticket booking, to disembarking at their destination.
Passengers desire personalized experiences that cater to their unique preferences. This can involve offering a range of options and choices, such as different seating configurations, preferences, and the ability to customize their travel experience according to their needs.
Providing a Tailored Mobility Experience
Passengers appreciate services that are aligned with their preferences.
First of all, they expect to receive accurate and up-to-date information about their journey. This can include details about train or flight schedules, delays, cancellations, and alternative travel options. Providing this information in real-time helps passengers plan their journeys more effectively and minimizes potential inconveniences.
Another crucial example of a service that customers expect to be provided is access to the internet during their journey. This allows them to stay connected, browse the web, work, communicate, or simply be entertained. Providing reliable and high-speed internet access on board enhances the overall travel experience.
Mobility customers also desire entertainment options during their journey. This can include in-seat screens offering movies, TV shows, music, and games. Infotainment systems can also provide destination-related information, travel tips, and cultural insights, enriching the passenger’s experience.
By incorporating these elements into their services, transportation providers can meet the expectations of passengers and create a positive and memorable journey experience.
The challenge lies in synchronizing these services and creating an integrated, seamless passenger experience across all channels. Mobility providers are exploring cloud services, passenger apps, onboard portals, and information systems to achieve this integration. Fast innovation cycles, standardization, and technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) are pivotal in inventing, implementing, and rolling out new services tailored to passengers’ needs.
The Role of Real-Time Data in Mobility
Real-time data sharing among vehicles and systems allows for a continuous and efficient exchange of information.
For example, vehicles are able to share essential information such as vehicle position, speed, acceleration, and heading through Basic Safety Messages (BSMs). This data is collected mainly for monitoring and security purposes by the mobility company that needs to have a deep understanding of the situation.
However, the same data can also be exposed to different touch points. For instance, thanks to this data, mobile apps will be able to evaluate how much time is left before the arrival of the vehicle and give that information to the users.
Real-Time Data for a Transparent Mobility Experience
Passenger information provision plays a crucial role in empowering customers to make informed travel choices. Real-time and live updates instill confidence and reduce uncertainty, ultimately providing a sense of control to passengers.
Accurate and timely information also improves customer satisfaction, encourages reuse, attracts new users to public transport, and helps refine products and services. Doing so builds trust between transportation providers and passengers. When passengers have access to accurate and timely updates about their journey, they feel more informed and confident in the services provided.
Real-time data also encompasses at-stop departure information, on-vehicle audiovisual next-stop data, real-time journey planning, and in-service update alerts, enhancing access to public transport services.
Last but not least, it’s important to take into consideration that in the travel and transport industry it is not always possible to avoid service interruptions completely. Delays, cancellations, or changes in travel schedules are common occurrences in the transportation industry.
Accurate and up-to-date real-time information plays a significant role in mitigating the impact of disruptions on the customer experience. By providing live journey details online and on board, leveraging social media updates, live announcements, and direct customer communication, operators ensure a regular flow of information to customers.
Early communication about changes or disruptions allows passengers to adjust their plans, minimizing inconvenience and ensuring the least disruptive experience possible.
Mia-Platform for a Better Mobility Experience
Mia-Platform has a high expertise in the Mobility and transportation Industry, and it offers a lot of useful tools to enhance the Mobility Experience. As for data, Mia‑Platform Fast Data is a set of ready-to-use microservices that allows you to harness real-time data. With Mia‑Platform Fast Data, you’ll be able to connect different sources, ingest and clean data, aggregate it according to your business needs in Single Views, and securely serve your external channels in milliseconds via API.
Thanks to the potential of cloud computing, Mia‑Platform Fast Data detects changes in the source system, updates the Single View accordingly, and makes it available to all channels in near real-time. This ensures that you can always use the most updated version of your data available, providing a single source of truth to your channels.
In other words, Mia-Platform Fast Data acts as a data management layer: it decouples the underlying systems from the external channels, enabling you to offload the legacy systems. At the same time, it provides data to the touchpoints with the customer in a fast and standardized way, allowing you to easily integrate other channels.
This enables you to build out-of-the-box your Digital Integration Hub. This innovative paradigm addresses data issues by providing low-latency, high-speed API/event-based data access, tackling the complexity of omnichannel.
Adopting Mia-Platform Fast Data means being able to offload any legacy system from excessing workloads, relying on a shared performance layer where data is available in near real-time 24/7 and exposing data every time you need to.
Conclusions
The provision of a user-centric mobility experience relies heavily on real-time data. Transport operators are leveraging customer insights, implementing innovative technologies, and prioritizing the seamless integration of services to enhance the passenger journey.
Real-time information is crucial for an impeccable mobility experience as it enables effective planning, builds trust, mitigates disruptions, facilitates efficient decision-making, ensures safety and security, and ultimately enhances customer satisfaction.
By embracing a data-driven strategy with data constantly updated 24/7, mobility providers demonstrate their commitment to customer satisfaction. Passengers appreciate being kept informed and updated throughout their journey, even in the face of disruptions. This proactive approach to communication can significantly enhance the overall passenger experience and contribute to higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
As Mia-Platform, during the Covid-19 pandemic, we helped Trenord to use real-time data to guarantee safe travels to their passengers: read the success case to learn more!
