This section provides an overview of the most important developments of the coming years, which will define the way personalization will be used, specifically in the public transport sector.
The smartphone will become the predominant customer channel in the coming years. Currently, the smartphone application of NS is only used for delivering information-related services. The smartphone will in the coming years be developed as a travel product (Nationaal Beraad Openbaar Vervoer, 2014). Furthermore, digital authentication via smartphone is already mainstream, using applications, biometric identification or SMS codes (Harley, 2015). Mobile sensors are becoming more and more sophisticated, smartphone applications will collect sensory information and analyze it to deliver context-based personalization (Walker & Cearley, 2015). Because of this combination of functionality and authentication possibilities, the smartphone is the ideal channel to deliver personalized, context-aware services.
Companies should follow this trend and create or adapt a smartphone application and a mobile website in order to have relevant and personalized customer contacts. Customer expectations regarding smartphone applications are very high (Kirschner & Kenney, 2015) and the development of an application with a good user experience is crucial in determining success. In order to make the mobile channel user-friendly and intuitive, the User Experience should be designed according to design guidelines, which are e.g. provided by Apple (Apple, 2015) and Google (Google, 2015). Making the website or application responsive is mandatory and it is recommended to use existing User Interaction (UI) patterns (VenturePact, 2015). An example of a highly rated application is the Airbnb app for Android and iOS, which turns the complex process of booking a room into something easy, fast and convenient (Android App Store, 2015).
Personalizing customer interactions via the smartphone channel poses some specific challenges and opportunities. A big challenge in providing context-aware personalization is not only collecting and analyzing context data in real-time, but also connecting it to structured data from all sorts of databases. Only then, a complete customer view can be developed and personalization can be applied optimally. Another challenge is creating services that are relevant and optimized for the mobile channel. Nearly all current services of NS can function on smartphones, but do not use all possible opportunities the smartphone offers, like contextual information and behavioral information from the customer using his smartphone. For example, the journey planner is currently static: it only gives the times and platforms the customer needs. Using the opportunities of the smartphone, the journey planner could tell customers exactly how to walk, how much time is left and where to sit strategically, so that at the next transfer, the walking distance will be minimized.
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The most important development of the coming years in the public transport sector will be the development of
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), which means a shift from buying means (e.g. cars or bikes) or tickets (e.g. train or tram tickets) for transport, to buying mobility services, in which the key is that the traveler needs to get from A to B. MaaS makes public transport fully demand-driven and data-driven and is enabled by the smartphone being a dominant multifunctional customer channel. It enables more efficient use of resources, a decrease in congestion and a higher customer satisfaction. The European Commission has stated MaaS to be a key theme in their Work Programme 2016-2017 regarding transport (European Commission, 2015) and the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities also focuses on “better integration and management of collective city transport for door-to-door seamless multi-modality” (Heuser & Schroer, 2015). McKinsey states that urban mobility is at a tipping point and that new technologies will revolutionize the way urban transport is being carried out (Bouton & Knupfer, 2015).
Several projects are already being carried out to start realizing MaaS in smart cities. The most commonly known and widely spread example is Uber, a company connecting taxi drivers and passengers via a smartphone application. Passengers can book a ride and instantaneously, they can see where their driver is and how long it is going to take until they get picked up. People without a taxi driver’s license can drive passengers around via the application UberPOP, which is controversial in a lot of countries. Currently, Uber has more than 160.000 drivers and every day, more than 1 million Uber rides are being made (Huet, 2014). Other ridesharing applications like Blablacar, Lyft and Sidecar are also growing quickly (Alba, 2015).
Finland is currently very busy realizing MaaS in parts of their country. The first step was taken by implementing
Kutsuplus, a flexible bus service in the Helsinki area which can be requested via a smartphone application and which automatically adapts its travel routes and schemes based on the passenger demand (Kutsuplus, 2015). The Dutch National think thank has also described this idea as the first step towards a travel system that completely offers MaaS (Hovenkamp, 2014). Based on their experiences with Kutsuplus, 23 private and public companies such as the Helsinki Public Transport company, taxi company Uber and Siemens are now collaborating in an open market model with broad co-operation to create the first full MaaS ecosystem in the world (MaaS.fi, 2015).
Personalization plays a crucial role in realizing MaaS. Travelers need to have up- to-date, correct and relevant information to their disposal in order to choose how they would like to travel, to prevent information overload (Liang et al., 2007). This can be realized by real-time, context-based personalization that uses data from all relevant travel modes. A working example of this concept from Finland can be seen in Figure 52, which shows a smartphone application that provides personalized information about available travel options. Estimating how busy a vehicle is and where it is located, can be done by measuring how many devices are present in a certain environment using a travel application. Google and TomTom already use this method to measure road traffic (Barth, 2009).
Applying real-time, context-based personalization to enable seamless, multimodal transport will result in a personal journey for every customer. Customers will have detailed information about their travel times and delays and the expected availability of seats, which removes the two most important dissatisfiers of public transport in the current situation (CROW, 2015). NS will have to collaborate with relevant Dutch public transport companies as well as with technology partners in order to realize
MaaS. At a technical level, data sources from different environments will need to be connected and applications will need to be developed that can provide optimal transport options. At a political and organizational level, people from a lot of companies will need to work together closely to avoid organizational barriers. Different and, sometimes, conflicting stakeholder goals will need to be integrated towards common goals.
Figure 52 – Example of MaaS- application (MaaS.fi, 2015)
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