The exciting future of customer experience innovation

Transcript

Good evening, everybody.

Before we begin the proceedings, on behalf of all those present, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I'd also like to pay respect to Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as traditional custodians of knowledge for this land. And that's something we say particularly at the University of Technology Sydney, which is where I'm from.

I'm delighted to see so many people here tonight. I'd like to give a very special welcome to the Minister, the Honourable Andrew Constance, Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, Howard Collins, CEO of Sydney Trains, Tim Reardon, Secretary for Transport, New South Wales, as well as many of our industry and government partners in the UTS community.

For those of you who I haven't met, I'm Glenn Wightwick. I'm the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Innovation and Enterprise at UTS. It's a glorious title. For the last three years, I've actually been looking after our research portfolio at UTS. And actually, as of last Tuesday, I've moved into this new portfolio. As part of that role, I look after our innovation and entrepreneurship. We do a lot of work with students and industry, but the enterprise part of my work effectively takes all of the work we do in our research and helps connect it to our community, to our stakeholders, to industry, and so on.

At UTS, we are a university of technology. I know that's part of our name. We're very committed to using technology to improve lives, whether it's from things like low-cost, easy-to-operate systems to remove arsenic from groundwater in Vietnam, which is an interesting project we're involved in at the moment, to the technology that we'll be talking about here tonight—the responsive passenger information systems.

This is all work characterised by our commitment to collaborating with partners to develop new technologies for very practical and yet innovative applications. I won't say too much more on the responsive passenger information systems—you'll hear more from our experts on that—but this is a really important project that will help improve customer comfort and overall experience at busy stations like Wynyard or Town Hall on the Sydney train network, which will be welcomed by many, including me. I'm a person who loves public transport. I catch the ferry and the train to work each day, and I walk through the lovely tunnel underneath Central. So the idea of responsive passenger information systems is very appealing.

What's made this possible has been the commitment and close collaboration between our researchers and the industry partners involved: Sydney Trains, the Rail Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre, and Transport for New South Wales. I'd like to congratulate everyone involved. I remember a meeting we had with the Minister probably 12 or 18 months ago where we kind of threw around some ideas, and it's been very, very exciting to see, since that point, a number of us coming together and working on this technology. I'd like to, as I said, congratulate everybody.

Clearly, there's unprecedented passenger growth. I just learnt that there are 1.3 million passenger journeys on Sydney Rail every day, I think 388 million a year. That's an incredibly large number. Clearly, there are people like me who have increasing expectations of the responsiveness of our public transport system, and clearly there's lots of infrastructure constraints as we grow Sydney and demand more transport and rail capacity.

I believe that only by working together can we deliver innovative solutions that are going to be of benefit to all of us here in Sydney, and then to take those solutions and translate them into capability, working with small and medium enterprises and other organisations in the industry to potentially take them out to the world.

So you've probably heard enough from me. I'd like now to introduce one of the people behind this great work at UTS, and she'll be our host for this evening, Dr Michelle Zeibots from the UTS Transport Research Centre.

Michelle is a transport planner specialising in the analysis of sustainable urban passenger transport systems. In her research at UTS, she works with our Institute for Sustainable Futures as well as within our Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, where she lectures in transport engineering. We're very fortunate to have her at UTS. She's been absolutely integral to this research project and to building collaborative research partnerships with all of the parties involved. Please join me in welcoming Dr Michelle Zeibots.

[Applause]

Thank you, Glenn. So tonight's very exciting for us. It's the culmination of several months of research that's taken place over the last year. It's been a very big team of researchers at UTS from a number of different faculties, many of whom are here tonight.

What we want to do tonight is we want to talk about the nature of the problem that we've been charged with trying to solve, and we also want to talk about the technology. So as you can see, we're all set up for that, and hopefully that'll be quite exciting.

So what we're going to try to do—we had a dress rehearsal earlier that went sort of okay—so hopefully now that we're here and doing the real thing and we've got all of you here to watch and participate in this demonstration, hopefully it'll go really smoothly.

But before we tell you that story, what I'd like to do is just give you a little bit of background about the project.

So basically we are looking at the development of a new class of passenger information system, and it uses robotic technology, so it's only been made possible with the new sensor technologies and actuation technologies that are around at the moment that weren't available 10 years ago.

Responsive passenger information systems differ very much from the earlier forms of passenger information system technology, which we call static and dynamic. Statics are basically just the signs that we see on railway stations and throughout the railway environment, and dynamic signs are those signs that change. We often see the dynamic passenger information systems on platforms where you can see things changing and the times are being updated and what have you.

What we're proposing here goes far beyond that. I guess it's also a form of technology that we hope will demonstrate tonight that utilises a very new and different approach—a very new philosophy to technology—and we're not just seeing it happen in transport, we're seeing it in a number of different areas.

You'll often hear the term "human in the loop" or "human-centred design", and what that basically means is that designers, engineers, technologists are now looking at ways in which to look at the natural instincts, the predilections, the needs of users of a system, and actually integrating that into the structure and function of the system in order to make the system work even better than what it otherwise would.

This is a very big step away from old approaches to technology that involve what are often called command and control approaches, where you've got actors or operators directing everybody but not necessarily or really considering what it is that users are after and what they might want.

So this is all very compatible with the customer service philosophy that we've seen blossom here in Sydney recently. Networks like the Sydney Trains Network are very different now to what they were and how I remember them only just a few years ago. So it's been wonderful to see that change, and we're hoping as UTS researchers that we'll be able to contribute to that ongoing change and improvement.

So, okay, back to our story. We're going to try and tell it as a story in order to make it more interesting. I remember an engineer once saying to me, "You know, Michelle, people respond to stories. They don't respond to bullet points." So here we go. Let's hold on tight and see what happens.

All right, so every new technology needs a problem. So what I'd like to do in order to get us on our way with this story is to ask Tony Eade to come up and join us.

Tony is the Executive Director of the Future Network Delivery Directorate, and he's responsible for planning our future network.

[Short exchange about the clicker.]

All right, so to get us going, Glenn's mentioned it, and it's been through all the papers. Lots of people are talking about these incredible growth rates that we're seeing on the Sydney Trains Network.

Can you give us some background on that? What's been happening? Just run us through it.

Well, certainly there's no doubt about it. There's been unprecedented growth on our network. In fact, it's so busy out there, it's really becoming something we need to address very quickly.

If I draw your attention to that graph up there, you can see from 1990 there's been a steady growth right through to about today. But when we get further on into the future, and we predict the future, it's absolutely growing at a very rapid pace, and it means we have to do something differently to address that.

In the immediate future, right now, here and now, with more trains, more services, and obviously we have to think carefully with innovative and smart ways of tackling the future demand.

Is it just the morning and afternoon peak that we're seeing this growth in, or is there something else going on?

No, not at all. If you guys are on the trains all the time, you can now see that it's not typically just an AM and PM peak. Our trains are full all the time, not just any time. And if you take traditionally an AM and PM peak, we're not an AM peak railway anymore.

In the off-peak, between peaks, and on weekends, it's quite extraordinary. And if you have a look at that slide where it's got 2021, on weekdays, by 2021, we're going to have a 20% growth on weekdays. But take a look at the weekend—120%. And for those who don't know, we carry about a half a million people on a weekend. Just imagine 1.3 million people travelling on our network on a weekend. And that's a really good story.

Yeah, so what is causing this? Because it does seem to have happened quite suddenly.

Well, it hasn't really been suddenly, but take this station here, Town Hall. It's been happening for a while now. But take Town Hall and have a look at that station in the AM peak. It's full of people. And we'll talk about that a bit later on.

But when you look at that, and you look at things that we've been doing as Sydney Trains over the years—you know, we've introduced Opal. We're much cleaner. We're a lot smarter. Our customers and our staff are more interacting. Staff are very visible. Look at the stations and the rail corridors, and you see development everywhere.

So people are attracted to the network. And I think the biggest success for us, more so than just our brand, is the fact that we've built something here that's quite unique. We have been able to demonstrate to the community and our customers that we care and we move them. They trust us to get about their day, and I think that's a very big deal for us.

Yeah, okay. So to the project now. So in the very early days when we started, you gave us the direction. You said, "Look, I want you to focus on Town Hall Station, what could be done there with the technology, and also at Parramatta Station." So just give us a bit more background on why you asked us to focus on that.

Well, there's three key reasons why we did that. Let's start with Town Hall.

Town Hall is a busy station, very unique. 250,000 people interact with that station every day. That's a large number in any shape or form. The staff at Town Hall have to move that type of number on and off trains, and they do a fantastic job every day doing it.

But just imagine that train that's just on that picture there arriving. On that train is about 1,200 to 1,500 people. About 1,000 of those people are going to get off onto that platform, where on that platform there's 700-plus people to get on.

And how do you do that and manage that with the train every three minutes coming in and out with the same scenario and hold that train for no more than 60 seconds so you keep the railway running? It's quite remarkable.

So Town Hall is one of the reasons, because if there's anything we can do to make the innovation and the operation a lot more seamless over there and predict something like that, it will really help us.

Then we talk about Parramatta, and Parramatta is the other location where it's phenomenally starting to grow to the point where it's a city in its own right. Very soon there'll be 20 trains per hour running through that place. Curved platforms, same scenarios, and what we've found ourselves in a position is that we may have a new Town Hall on our hands.

So we have to bring that into play. So I guess for mine is that by bringing and incorporating two very busy places on our network—the west part of Sydney and the CBD—anything that we come up with here we can get immediate benefit, and that's the rationale behind picking those stations.

So I'm hearing you on that, but I have to say, having worked on the project now, Town Hall is—I mean, I was quite overwhelmed by what it is that Sydney Trains does every day in order to keep that station going.

I've got all the respect for the staff. It's taken a long time for those guys to get it to a position where they're moving 70-plus thousand people in two peaks, getting them through there seamlessly, very safely.

And then the third and final thing is that map that you see up there. We've got quite a few trains in the morning peak making their way into the city, carrying thousands of people.

And when you think about it, for one hour there's 120 trains merging from 15 lines, curving their way to six lines to make their way through.

And every one of those trains will make its way to Town Hall, some shape or form. 250,000 people touch that place every day, and we really need to respect that as they work through this.

Okay, so with—I mean, I'm also very mindful that we've got a new timetable just about to be introduced. So with that new timetable, how does that impact on Town Hall?

Oh, it impacts beautifully. Let's start very simply. Trains are going to go through there very frequently, and you could argue that if you've got a train travelling through there on time very frequently and more of them coming through with more choice of where to go, you will move the people a lot easier, our customers a lot easier.

But to do that takes extraordinary effort by the station staff, the train crew and all the operators to make that work. So you still need to do more.

But when we talk about the timetable, we talk about the biggest permanent uplift of a timetable ever brought on this network.

Look, I've been here a long time, and this is the biggest thing that we've ever done in terms of preparing for a timetable.

1,500 extra trains per week. That is quite extraordinary.

Have a look at the weekend to address that growth. 750 extra weekend trains will now appear. That doubles all the services everywhere, including the airport line, where it's much needed.

And between the AM and PM peak, we're pushing that to 250 extra trains in that period.

And that's a challenge for everybody, but it really starts to address the crowding issues that we have on the network, and it starts to produce us as a very effective railway.

So you are going to try and push more train paths through Town Hall during the peak periods with this new timetable?

Right. Not quite. I'll probably have to take a step back.

We can't put more trains through there. We need more signalling systems, and we need new and innovative technologies to help do that. We are at track capacity, and we need to do more if we're looking at that projected number into the future, and we are investing in that space.

And, in fact, when we move to new signalling and the technologies that we're talking about here today and the demonstration will help, I think, people understand the effort gone into managing Town Hall, but we also don't see relief for quite some time. The minister and the government of the day has invested heavily in Sydney Metro.

By 2019, we have the first cut, but it won't be until 2024 when that Metro makes its way under the harbour and through Central until we get some form of relief for that area.

When that happens and we introduce new signalling system, we will be able to run more, but until that time, until 2024, we have to think of a lot smarter ways of doing it.

So we've still got this problem at the core of the network centre that we have to deal with.

So more growth, going back to what you were originally saying. So the further growth, it does need more train paths.

So we've still got some time to wait for that. There is new technology on the horizon, but we've still got to do something in between.

And that's why we're here today. I mean, this is a good example of what we can do to support the staff, give them the tools, let them know some behind-the-scenes activity that will help nudge the customers to the areas they need to go so that we can actually load those trains and get them out much quicker.

And you never know. If we get that right and sequence it right, it might actually stimulate another train path. I guess we won't know until we test it out.

Okay, so it's sort of about stabilising the system as much as we can as trying to expand it.

That's correct.

So train paths are really valuable here.

They are. They are.

All right. So hold that thought.

[Short exchange about where to stand.]

All right, so what I'd like to do now is I'd like to invite Professor John Rose to join us.

Professor John Rose is the Director of the Centre for Business Intelligence and Data Analytics at UTS, and John is an economist.

So, quick question: How much is a train path worth?

So the simple answer to that is about $50 million to $60 million annually.

Okay, and how did you get that figure?

So, a bunch of calculations, of course, being an economist, a bunch of assumptions.

So if you assume that each additional train can carry, say, 1,200 people and that people will also be—you'll have additional trains on the shoulders of the peak, you can generate about 2,000 jobs from an additional train path.

Then based on that, most of the jobs that were likely to be created in the CBD from that additional train path are going to be higher value type jobs.

So you can say that that's basically worth $37 million.

Add on additional tourism and movement of lower skilled jobs and lower value jobs to suburban centres and you get about $50 million.

Okay, so that's quite a lot. I'm impressed by that.

So even if we were conservative and we took it down to, say, $40 million, that's still quite a lot.

So just a train path on our existing network, trying to squeeze that out of it, it's worth quite a bit.

And a lot of that is because of the particular role of the CBD, isn't it? So could you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah. So CBDs are really important to cities like Sydney because that's where most of the high value jobs are actually created and actually exist.

So the jobs that are basically designed to service international trade, global trade—that's not to take away from suburban centres, but the more suburban centres basically service the local residential areas and the workforce that is needed for the CBD centres.

So the CBD is the really big income generator for the city as a whole and that's why we see these bigger numbers, isn't it?

So Tony mentioned Parramatta CBD as well and there's also been a lot of discussion, not just recently but for a long time, about Parramatta as the second CBD.

So does that somehow conflict with the idea of trying to get more trains through the Sydney CBD or what's going on there, do you think?

So I don't think it actually conflicts with what I'm saying. I think that we will get to the point where somewhere like Parramatta could be a second CBD.

I think at the moment though the problem is capacity. So basically the public transport network is designed to get people into the city from all across the Sydney region.

So once we can actually build a network and get people to be able to travel to Parramatta from all over Sydney, I think you will see some shifts from the city towards that.

But at the moment we just have these constraints that are, I think, preventing that from actually happening.

So it's really the important thing for firms and these global businesses is that they're able to access the entire metropolitan workforce and not just a local area, which is why maybe Parramatta has struggled to take on that same role.

And I think we'll get there in the end, but I just don't think we're there right this moment.

Okay. All right. So from a people perspective, that's really interesting.

So what I think we might do now is ask Susanna LeBron to join us.

So Susanna is the Executive Director of the Customer Service Directorate at Sydney Trains, and Susanna's responsible for representing the customer inside Sydney Trains and lifting the value proposition.

So Susanna, Tony was talking a lot about the growth and what's been responsible for that, and he also mentioned very briefly that the quality of the services or what people are experiencing is just different now and it's made it more attractive.

So what sorts of things have been happening?

What is really important to remember is that in 2013 we took on a really ambitious program of uplifting our customer service across Sydney Trains but transport at large.

And what I'm really pleased to say is that we have sat at 90% now for a strong 18 months, but we did start that journey at 78%.

What I want to show you next is the nine key drivers that we focus on, which our customers naturally, when you look at them, they're quite simple, but these are the areas that our customers consistently remind us that we need to focus on.

I'm just going to talk about a couple straight up, Michelle, if that's okay.

So first of all, ticketing. We have had one of the biggest changes in the ticketing product that you would have seen across the whole of, I suppose, Australia, and it has been a resounding success.

So the Opal option, the Opal product, 13 million people per week use that to travel. So 13 million travel on Opal. Half of those are on rail.

So naturally we need to pay attention to looking after those customers that are travelling on us with the Opal product.

The other thing that's really important for our customers is timeliness. So what does that mean? On-time performance.

Our customers really need to know and need to know that we've got a reliable service.

Again, pleased to say that in the last financial year, 93.4% on-time performance, which I think any of you that travel regularly know that you can pretty much turn up and nearly go in most of our stations, and great with the more trains, more services, that's going to be even more enhanced.

One of the other things that I think is important to call out, because I think if you go to a barbecue now, people often say, "Oh, the trains are so clean, the stations are so clean." That's the reality.

Huge investment has occurred, not only in our station environment but with our trains as well.

And the actual benefit of cleanliness also means that our customers feel safe and secure.

So through that investment we also have customers that are now really pleased to be at stations at all times of the day, even through the night, because of the way it's been maintained and cleaned.

Okay. So can I just interrupt you there a little bit?

So on all of these areas, not just the ones that you've covered there, so the customer satisfaction survey result is what's been driving and guiding a lot of what you're doing.

So you're scoring on 90%, are you looking to just stay there or tell us what your plans are?

Well, I'm not going to do cruisy street and say, "Yep, we're at 90% and we'll just leave it there."

The reality is to maintain such a high score, and any major organisation that has customer service as its key deliverable needs to consistently look at how they need to improve.

So to maintain, we need to keep improving.

One of the other two areas that's really important and actually leads into why this UTS partnership has really started to bring around success for us is around customer service.

So if you get customer service right, which we clearly are doing really well with that, the model of out and about has only been really supported through technology.

It's enabled our people at stations to be responsive and dynamic and have real-time information through the technology that we now have.

The other thing that leads into that is information.

Information is critical, and if we have information that is proactive and available not just for us but for our customers, it's actually the game changer to match what Tony has absolutely articulated as a growing patronage for us.

So you need to find new ways of doing things in order to just to stay—push the clicker, push the clicker.

Right. We didn't really quite rehearse that, but this is the clincher page. So this is the one.

So we've had some great workshops with UTS, and the reality is that not only have we had a fantastic partnership and we are benefiting, and, you know, transport at large is benefiting, but our customers are now going to benefit from the partnership that we've now got through UTS.

The key on this diagram is to actually look at the fact that we've got arrows going in both ways.

We know that with the growth and with the success of the service that we now offer, we actually need our customers to help us out because, as you can see with Town Hall, if we just rely on us as operators to gather information and work with that information, we may limit our success on how we look after these customers and their journey.

But if we actually get our customers—and we've had some fantastic apps already today—but if we actually get our customers to be part of this, and this is where you heard the words by Tony saying nudging and behind-the-scenes technology, it means that we really will fulfil all the information that we need to actually look after our customers and have them part of the operational journey.

So if you've got new ways to think about all of this information and engage with your customers, then you're able to get that relationship going in more of a two-way thing.

Because this is what's exciting for us as researchers is this human-in-the-loop thing. So people have got these wonderful instincts and desires. They want to be more comfortable. They want to have a better experience.

So it's just trying to find the ways to harness that, isn't it? You probably are thinking, "Okay, seriously, what is it that we're going to be showing tonight?" But this is laying the foundation for this.

Somehow we need to get information that is proactive and real beyond what we have currently, which is our people on stations' position—yes, they've got the bright orange on, but visually they can only see so much.

To be able to get technology and the ability to understand what our customers are doing on a regular basis means that we can be proactive in addressing what we know is about to come around the corner, which is consistently more requirements of our public transport system.

So if we've got that information going to people and they're getting more stuff on their mobile phones and their staff—not the staff, people, the Sydney Trains people—they're also getting more information about what's going on, then we're able to get that more symbiotic relationship going perhaps.

So a lot of you that travel on our transport network at large would be familiar with a multitude of apps and information that you can access.

We're consistently growing that technology to meet the demands, working very closely with the department headed up by Tony Braxton-Smith in transport around all the apps and the ability to understand inter-mode connections of our customers.

So for us, we can't just stop here. We need to understand behind the scenes what else can we feed into these apps, into this technology, to help not only our people in the operator environment but our customers understand what is it that they need to do to actually get their experience better.

Okay. So just to finish off, what's your vision? How do you want to use all this tech? What do you want people to feel?

Aspirationally, and I'd like to think that I can drop that word and we'll eventually make this happen, I would love for someone to get to their destination, whether it's sitting at an office or sitting at the movie cinema, and actually just think for a minute, "How on earth did I get here? I caught a bus and then I caught a train, but I glided through those experiences because I had information at hand that enabled me to make choices and wise choices, but I also had people in the operational environment nudging me and getting me around certain obstacles that when I got to my destination it was so seamless that really the recollection is that they just glided through." So that's where I'd like to think we end up.

Okay. All right, thanks for that.

Now, there's some other people that have had visions in the past that have been very critical to this story.

So I'd now like to ask the Minister, the Honourable Andrew Constance, to join us up here.

So Andrew, of course, is the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure and he's actually played quite an important role in this project. You might not think so, but you have, because I think if you hadn't told us to go and do it, it wouldn't have happened. So really that's what did occur.

But look, there's a question that I've been dying to ask you for a long time and I've never had the opportunity to do it, because I was really impressed and taken as a transport planner with the whole customer service thing that Gladys Berejiklian introduced.

And I thought, frankly, it was going to be very difficult for you to top that. Don't tell her this. No, it's pretty good.

But the whole technology thing and the technology focus that you've really given the portfolio has been, I think, incredibly significant.

How did you know? How did you know that it was going to pan out to be as significant as what it has been?

Well, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, transport's a technology business and it will grow so rapidly and so quickly.

So as we progress through a world where people basically, as Susanna said, just to be completely seamless.

So the impacts that artificial intelligence will have, the impacts in which certainly we're already seeing in terms of utilisation of the data behind Opal, ultimately people want a personalised service despite it being a public transport system that we're talking about.

And ultimately they want to be able to use technology in a way where it's pretty much at the speed of thought.

So we're going to see, I think, increasingly, and we've seen people obviously take up the apps. We open the data to allow those apps to be developed.

But this is much bigger than this. And I think we've got a tired old network. We're trying to utilise technology here to make it work more effectively.

And ultimately, as we see the advent of, for instance, autonomous vehicles, we've also got to look at ways in which we can apply some of those principles to the way in which people move in and around this tired old network.

So I think that shot of Town Hall where it's crowded between the stairs and that magical yellow line—again, we can't widen the platform