The speed of your vehicles, the price of your tickets, and the convenience of your timetable are all factors that customers look for from their public transport provider.
But not one of these alone can guarantee success. All these aspects, and more, are required to keep your customers happy.
The customer experience is vital to the public transport industry. If customers don’t enjoy their experience, they won’t use your service. It’s that simple.
And it’s important for the customer experience to always be at a high standard. After all, you have no way of knowing if your customers are regular commuters or just using your service as a one-off traveller.
The experience must be consistent and exceptional for every customer.
In this article we’re going to take a look at exactly what customers want from their public transport experience and how you can implement that.
What Customers Want from Public Transport
When it comes to their experience on public transport, customer expectations will vary. But there are 3 things that everyone wants from public transport...
1. Cost
Of course, cost is always going to be a factor when it comes to customer experience. Ticket prices need to be reasonable enough for customers to want to use public transport over their own vehicles. In other words, it needs to be worth it!
2. Comfort
Comfort is also an important factor - especially for daily commuters that will be using public transport everyday.
A vital aspect of comfort is safety. It’s important that customers, particularly in today’s climate, feel safe to use public transport.
COVID-19 has changed many businesses and processes, including public transport. One way to keep customers safe while travelling is to implement gates that can check passengers for COVID-19 symptoms before allowing them on the platform.
Our short-term goal is to launch new gates with three extra layers of safety by checking the temperature of passengers, doing a visual check to ensure they are wearing a face mask, and also by providing them with antibacterial hand gel.
3. Convenience
The final factor that customers want from public transport is convenience. If public transport isn’t convenient, then people will just turn to their own vehicles instead.
The transport sector can make journeys more convenient for passengers in many ways, such as by allowing customers to pay with their smartphone instead of a paper ticket. Or by adding more stops to a journey so that customers can arrive closer to their destination.
Another way to improve convenience is speed. No one likes to queue! Gunnebo’s Metro Bi-Parting Gates facilitate high-speed passenger flow, ensuring that more people can move through barriers, even during busy periods.
The Metro Bi-Parting Gate is so effective that it can allow up to 60 passengers per minute!
How to Improve the Customer Experience
Now that we’ve discussed what exactly it is customers are looking for from the perfect public transport experience, let’s take a look at 3 ways the experience can be improved…
1. Personalisation
People value personalisation. A Deloitte study reported that
1 in 4 people are willing to pay more for a personalised service, and 22% of customers are happy to share some data in return for more personalisation.
When it comes to public transport, personalisation could come in the form of tailored special offers for regular commuters.
Or it could be more in-depth. If you have an app for your transport services, then this could be personalised for users so that they only see the journeys that are relevant to them.
2. Integrated Technology
Speaking of apps, billions of people carry smartphones and use them for more and more daily tasks.
By integrating your passenger gates with smart technology, you can improve the customer experience by offering smartphone tickets and more - such as remote connectivity apps.
Remote connectivity apps could give information about flow rates and lane availability so that customers aren’t held back during peak times.
3. Floor Management
We’ve already mentioned the benefits of Gunnebo gates for increased passenger safety and convenience, but our gates can also provide heightened security.
Our automatic fare collection gates facilitate ergonomic floor management. This improves the customer experience by allowing customers to travel through the gates in a continuous flow, while also maintaining their safety, comfort, and convenience.
Final Thoughts
Without customers, there is no public transport industry. So, it’s important to keep your customers happy at all times.
To find out more about how to improve the customer experience, download our free whitepaper.