Digital Transformation of Arriva Bus: A Seamless Customer Experience

Arriva UK Bus (AUKB) is one of the UK’s largest and best-known transportation brands. It operates 5,900 buses across London, South East and North of England, and the Midlands and Wales. A subsidiary of Arriva, it provides tickets and travel information for using the bus network across the UK. As part of a broader company transformation, Arriva wanted to overhaul its digital experience for customers purchasing bus tickets and searching for travel information. With 90% of bus travel outside London still being purchased by cash, a seamless, enticing, easy-to-use digital experience was essential to drive behavior change and digital channel shift by travelers.

Arriva UK Bus (AUKB), one of the UK’s largest transportation brands, was facing a significant challenge with its digital experience for customers purchasing bus tickets and searching for travel information. The company's fragmented suite of journey planning and purchase tools were difficult for travelers to use. The company had two separate bus mobile apps: one for planning and one for retailing. Each regional operating company had its own discrete web experience. There were three separate web platforms for retail, planning, and marketing content. There was little to no correlation between the content on the different sites. Any content management actions on the site required significant custom development and manual input. The digital business was further impacted by the legacy technology running the content and retail platforms, with two different versions of EpiServer in use. The retail platform version had not been upgraded since the original sites were created, and the site also experienced Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance issues. Finally, none of the digital platforms were scalable, with multi-day outages and problems caused by traffic spikes.

AUKB partnered with ORM Digital to overhaul its digital strategy and roadmap. ORM helped AUKB develop a commercial business case for change, define and scope the digital ecosystem to support it, and then acted as system integrator to create the integrated digital marketing and retail solution powered by Acquia Cloud Platform and AWS. ORM engaged with a wide range of stakeholders from across AUKB business, from commercial, customer experience (CX) and call center leads to regional managers and central and regional marketing. They defined a content model and API architecture focused on giving users a connected experience, enriching the journey planning experience, and providing retail and journey options to users while they browsed marketing content. ORM configured Drupal CMS to serve content through a number of headless APIs, allowing a unique customer experience to be authored within the web application, where digital retail content (tickets, offers, journeys) could be positioned alongside relevant marketing information. The headless API was also used to provide content for the native apps, allowing content editors to manage content for multiple client types. This unique approach removed the need for the business to run two separate marketing and retail platforms and created a more seamless customer experience that converted at a higher rate. Arriva now has a single app and website using a core suite of components that have their content managed from one platform (Drupal CMS), where they can be reused and repurposed across each regional business. A more visual interface using maps with real-time journey data allows easy tracking of buses within their route and quick purchase through a streamlined booking flow.

• The new platform went live in August 2020 and achieved immediate, tangible results. Despite the pandemic, the solution has continued to grow its user base, with total users now over 2.6 million per month as of July 2021 and revenues up 32% year-over-year. The new platform is positioned to be a leading transport retail and marketing platform, lending itself not just to bus but to trains and multi-modal journeys. Arriva intends to determine how this capability, built on Acquia, can be leveraged in other countries across Europe. The digital transformation has also improved operational efficiency, increased brand engagement and profitability, and provided better customer insight. By moving from cash to digital purchasing, AUKB has gained a better understanding of users' traveling habits, enabling them to cross-sell and upsell travelers better tickets for their journeys. It has also reduced bus queues, improved the driver experience, and allowed the business to understand how different routes were patronized. For the first time, it has been able to optimize timetables and fleets based on insight and data.

• Revenues reached seven figures.
• User visits totaled over 1 million by the second month.
• Total users reach over 2.6 million per month.