Putting the customer at the heart of rail strategy for the future (Guest blog by KATLAS)
Great British Railways (GBR) customers and SMEs are not connected. In order to coordinate multiple legs of a journey with extended suppliers, customers are obliged to repeat their story many times – take for example leasing a car to complete your journey: you need insurances, driving licence, proof of address and bank account to prove KYC. When something goes wrong it is difficult to identify cause and mitigation as T&Cs are hidden in third party systems. Over time this means that customers have a different version of themselves across multiple suppliers with possibility of it being used for research.
Mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) is a disappointing ambition, as it prevents the direct relationships and level playing field needed for competition to foster continuously improving customer experience. The shiny new ‘preferred’ intermediary becomes the marketplace. Intermediaries are in essence a market failure – they reflect customers/SMEs not having the digital tools and capabilities to discover and execute their desired outcomes. Looking across the HMG estate, public services are not yet experimenting with alternative strategies that directly serve the consumer.
Ownership and control of data
Today, customers and SMEs are not offered integrated services; instead they have a separate log-in with data stored under the control of multiple suppliers some of which are yet to digitalise due to the lack of tools and capabilities. GBR is not equipped to compete for customers on the emerging web-3.0 virtual high street as customers will no longer select the GBR website but enter a virtual pavilion of competing travel solutions with incentives and bespoke bolt-ons to enhance their experience. Without a portable persona, a single version of themselves which they own and control, customers cannot share machine readable data for connected personalised services.
Put the customer at the heart of the Rail Strategy
The future looks like the present with one important change. Storage is no longer in the client server, but instead data is owned and managed by the customer. Now when a customer enters your marketplace you start your conversation where you left off, no longer needing to repeat form filling processes, in fact the customer brings an ever richer data set valuable for predicting and planning services. GBR now has convenient access to a trusted persona of the customer to build a personalised journey by connecting the best combination of suppliers. A new direct 1:1 relationship with the suppliers ensures that failures can be identified and mitigated more immediately.
This can be achieved on a mobile network today
There is an answer already, with the potential to mobilise and restore the commercial opportunities of the whole GBR estate – passenger flows, freight and utilities, asset management retail and hospitality, whilst still meeting key sustainability targets, at no extra cost, in fact massively reducing data reporting as a percentage of margin. But it can only be done with zero-trust automation using interoperable open source technologies, by which we mean systems that talk to each other without barriers, and that are Digitally Secure by Design (DSbD) as a standard for the management of sensitive data.
KATLAS is a leading innovator in providing web3.0 secure networks for SMEs seeking to utilize next generation technologies. It launched Blockchain-in-a-Box (BIAB) as a comprehensive, best-in-class suite of modern tools for SMEs to compete in the next generation of the internet.
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