DIGITAL & STRATEGIC
UX DESIGN PRACTICE
SERVICE DESIGN
Guiding Railway Innovation: A Toolkit for Creating Customer-Centric Services
Supporting railway companies in envisioning their future customers and integrating CX insights into every decision.
A railway company had gathered extensive customer research, including insights on needs, journeys, and personas, but required effective ways to communicate this information to a diverse range of audiences, such as future customers, communities, partners, and stakeholders.
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Arup utilised a well-established service design methodology to transform the transport company's research into a comprehensive set of communication and design tools. These tools prioritised customer needs and fostered a customer-centric mindset across the organisation and its partners. Leveraging Arup's extensive experience in the transport sector, the tools offered clear guidelines and inspiration for designers and stakeholders, helping to refine the customer strategy and embed a customer-focused approach from the project's inception through to the operation of the rail service.
By translating insights into actionable tools, Arup addressed the common challenge organisations face when failing to effectively utilise research. These tools fostered a shared understanding of customer needs, helped shape new success metrics, and influenced future design decisions, ensuring customer-centricity and public support throughout the EWR project.
Arup was tasked with developing a Customer Experience Toolkit to guide the creation of a new railway service linking Oxford and Cambridge base on customer needs and preferences. By engaging with various stakeholders and leveraging a service design methodology, Arup created personas, and a customer experience insight framework to embed costumer insights across the organisation and aligning departments around customer-centered practices.
To do so, Arup conducted one-on-one interviews and workshops with stakeholders from Strategy, Requirements, Operations, Engineering, and External Relations to understand the toolkit's requirements. They audited existing qualitative and quantitative research data to develop customer segmentation applicable throughout the design process. This bespoke delivery approach, informed by an initial discovery phase, enabled collaborative project delivery and the creation of tools now owned and managed by railway organisation.
