Passenger Focus

About Passenger Focus

 

Passenger Focus is an independent public body set up by the UK Government to represent the interests of rail, bus, coach, and tram passengers. One way this influential organisation keeps itself aware of passengers’ views is through large-scale passenger surveys on rail and bus. The reports that Passenger Focus publishes often receive extensive coverage in the media.

 

The Challenge

 

Passenger Focus wanted to make much more of its survey data publicly available than would be practical in static reports. Many people are interested in its survey results, from rail and bus operators, to government, academics, special interest groups and the general public. Passenger Focus wanted to find an interactive reporting tool that it could build into its website so that anyone could use it to create their own charts, simply, instantly, without needing to be an ‘expert user.’

 

The solution also had to be highly cost effective for this publicly-funded body. The organisation’s own survey analysts needed to be able to design and publish the interactive reports and add in new waves of data when these became available. With so many potential users, lisence costs also needed to be affordable.

 

The Solution 

 

Passenger Focus reviewed a number of potential interactive marketing research reporting systems and selected Dapresy Pro. Murray Leader, Research Adviser at Passenger Focus explains: “There were a few key reasons for choosing Dapresy Pro: first the role of the central administrator, or project manager did not require any special programming skills, just someone with intermediate proficiency in Excel or SPSS, meaning I could manage it myself; second, Dapresy Pro had a good range of functions like research report generation and it can be used as a query tool; and third, it looked well thought through from a market research perspective. A lot of the things one would need, like applying weighting or being able to set minimum reporting sizes, were built in.”

 

After an initial day of training on site, followed by remote training and support from Dapresy, Murray embarked on developing an interactive reporting dashboard for the Bus Passenger Survey. This annual Bus survey asks passengers about their experiences regarding a specific journey. Survey forms are given to passengers on a representative sample of bus routes in the areas covered. In the Autumn 2011 survey, 21,500 responses were received.

 

The survey report was due four months after Murray’s training, and he set a target to launch the new interactive dashboard on the website and publish the conventional reports in parallel. Due to the complexity of the reporting, some requirements went beyond standard functionality in Dapresy Pro, but these were provided by incorporating some custom charts created by Dapresy specialists in the Dapresy Chart Builder.

 

Murray reports his experience of Dapresy as ‘very positive’. Although not everything was achieved through the standard StoryTeller module, he remarks: “whenever we realised the standard approach couldn’t quite do what I needed, Dapresy was able to customize it for me using the Dapresy Chart Builder. In this regard, and generally, their commitment to customer service was fantastic.”

 

With the first project now live for six weeks, Murray has been able to direct his external stakeholders to the interactive dashboard. “It now allows them to get survey analysis without coming to me with a prescription for analysis, which in the past often meant follow-up requests too. Now they can follow up where the data takes them for themselves. It’s far easier for them and for us,” he comments.

 

Murray has already noticed that the requests for ad hoc reports from external stakeholders has diminished, while they also appear to be using the interactive dashboard successfully. “Given the fact that this is a much larger survey, the queries we have received have been quite limited,” he comments.

 

For the future, Murray says: “We are looking at Dapresy as a key tool in getting more of our research out to our audiences in a simpler, open, online way.”

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Outcomes Achieved with Dapresy

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• Provided the customer’s stakeholders and the public with easy-to-use interactive access to the Bus Passenger Survey data.

• A successful step forward in making more of the Passenger Focus research available interactively online.

• Reduced queries for ad hoc analysis, despite an increase in the size and complexity of the survey.

• End users created over a hundred charts in the six weeks since launch, without assistance or training.