Passengers pleased with Stockholm’s connected buses

The bus operator Keolis runs a hundred or so blue buses around the centre of Stockholm, which carry a total of one million passengers every week. Customer satisfaction is an important benchmark for measuring how well the public transport system is running. With the aim of increasing its passengers’ satisfaction, Keolis decided to invest in providing traffic disruption information, an area which has received the worst rating in surveys. After installing a system from Hogia in its buses, which uses screens to provide passenger information in real time, the customer satisfaction rating rose to 84 percent.

In November 2014 Keolis had a Hogia information system installed in 120 of its blue city centre buses. The screens in the buses provide passengers with real-time information about the next stops, connecting means of transport and journey planning options. Another way intended to make travelling easier is to display the latest traffic reports about, for instance, any disruption and alternative travel routes.

“We wanted to offer passengers a good product, and passenger information is part and parcel of our offering. We took our passengers wishes and requirements as our starting point when we invested in a new system. Since the panels have been introduced, we have had a record-high satisfaction rating,” says Karl Orton, technical director at Keolis.

Hogia’s solution is based on a system supporting open interfaces which facilitate integration with systems from a number of operators, enabling the screens in the buses to display information from every means of transport available.

“The Keolis project is exciting. We have mostly supplied solutions of this kind to customers operating bus services, who were previously entirely responsible for customer satisfaction. But now, the individual operators share the responsibility, which means that their role is changing. We want to be involved in and contribute to the bus companies' success," says Bengt Carlsson, business developer for Hogia Public Transport Systems.