Transport for Wales’ Challenge
The Transport for Wales Lab accelerator programme began with identifying a list of challenge statements Transport for Wales wanted to overcome to improve customer experience across the rail sector. Start-ups were then given this list of challenge statements and asked to provide a viable solution.
Briteyellow have been mapping the world’s indoor spaces since 2003, hoping to bring greater clarity and insight to the surrounding world through software and technology products that foster better connections between people and places. They aim provide a complete end to end solution for positioning, navigation, and tracking which is fully adapted to your environment, whilst remaining cost effective and tailored specifically to work for you.
Their solution allowed them to improve communication about station facilities and availability to enable customers to find and interact with staff easily, whilst also helping to reduce stress for passengers and encourage self-service. They decided that they could provide a solution for this problem following discovery interviews with customers, members of the accessibility and inclusion panel, members off the TfW team ranging from customer ambassadors to revenue staff, and passenger assist partners (Journey Call).
Why TfWL?
The team at Briteyellow joined TfWL accelerator, seeing it as a great opportunity to develop their product development skills, with the hopes to progress into a contract to pilot with Transport for Wales and partnering with Keolis Amey.
Development and Support
Throughout the programme, our innovation delivery team worked with Briteyellow collaboratively to help them understand in greater depth:
Product validation
Product market fit
Fail fast, fail smart, and fail cheap
Become customer obsessed, not competitor obsessed
How to apply the Lean Start-up Pyramid
How to use the Business Model Canvas
How to Develop the perfect customer persona
Why products fail (For example, “If you build it, they will come is not a strategy, it’s a prayer”)
By doing this, Briteyellow were able to conduct customer discovery interviews to give them a deeper insight into TfW’s pain points and helped focus their minds on the opportunities for their product.
The Solution
The final product Briteyellow presented to TfW was a proof of concept that crystalized into an APP and dashboard to improve the passenger experience and efficiency for staff. This product helped solve TfW’s challenge statement by providing customers with a virtual tour of facilities for travel planning, with augmented reality visual, voice and haptic guides at stations for enhanced wayfinding. With location insights giving crowd information and position tracking for both staff and customers, this would improve the overall rail experience for customers and staff.
Risks that Briteyellow faced were that end users or staff may not adopt the product if it was not a great fit. Additionally, a key part of their technology platform could be made obsolete by global competitors or their Intellectual Property may be lost.
The proof of concept APP and dashboard was tested and successfully validated through further customer and staff demos.
The Outcome
By the end of the programme, Briteyellow were delighted to have been amongst the winning startups and are now looking forward to taking this product forward for implementation with Transport for Wales, and to further collaboration with Keolis Amey.
Since completing the programme, Briteyellow have expressed that they are happy with everything they had accomplished throughout the programme and that they would recommend it to any other start-ups with an idea to help transform the Welsh rail experience.