Di­rect to the mo­bile: BRB reach­es its pas­sen­gers via What­sApp

Mile­stone in pas­sen­ger in­for­ma­tion: Trans­porta­tion com­pa­nies de­liv­er high-qual­i­ty op­er­a­tional data dai­ly. How­ev­er, on the way to the pas­sen­gers, this in­for­ma­tion of­ten gets lost be­cause it first pass­es through third par­ties like in­for­ma­tion ser­vices or dis­plays. A di­rect tech­ni­cal con­nec­tion be­tween com­pa­nies and pas­sen­gers is miss­ing.

The What­sApp mod­ule from ETC So­lu­tions fills ex­act­ly this gap. Via net­work and line-spe­cif­ic What­sApp chan­nels, trans­porta­tion com­pa­nies reach their pas­sen­gers im­me­di­ate­ly. The re­ports are au­to­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed from the op­er­a­tional con­trol sys­tem and sent with­out man­u­al in­ter­ven­tion as soon as de­fined thresh­olds such as de­lays of 15 min­utes or more, par­tial can­cel­la­tions, or re­place­ment bus ser­vices are de­tect­ed.

The Bavar­i­an Re­giobahn is among the first com­pa­nies to con­sis­tent­ly pur­sue this path. Over 13,000 pas­sen­gers fol­low the five chan­nels, as each line has its own chan­nel. Thus, pas­sen­gers sub­scribe pre­cise­ly to the in­for­ma­tion rel­e­vant to their line and re­ceive it si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly with op­er­a­tional re­al­i­ty.

The ad­van­tages are ob­vi­ous: max­i­mum reach with­out a pro­pri­etary app, no­tice­able re­lief for cus­tomer ser­vice through proac­tive in­for­ma­tion, high­est data qual­i­ty through au­to­mat­ed con­nec­tion to the con­trol sys­tem, and a free, ad-free, and pri­va­cy-friend­ly reg­is­tra­tion for pas­sen­gers.