live|work: Danish Rail: Service Usability

Our work : Danish Rail

Mapping the passenger experience – from A to Z.

The whole journey

168 million passengers travel on DSB Danish Rail each year on its rail services both within Denmark and across international borders. DSB wanted to identify opportunities to improve its customer service at every point of contact from the passenger’s home to their destination. Danish Rail needed research and analysis presented in a way that would enable them to quickly prioritise actions with high business impact reflecting the resources and budgets they had available.

Gathering real experiences

Central to this project was understanding the customer experience for Danish Rail passengers at every stage of their journey from finding out travel information before the journey begins; booking tickets over the phone, online or at the station; navigating the station; finding the right train and seat and finally, accessing local travel information at the end of the journey to enable passengers to get to their destination. A cross-section of customers using the Danish Rail service were shadowed and videoed in real time. This provided us with a wide range of insights and enabled us to identify issues as they occurred – corroborated with video evidence!

We identified 25 customer experience issues and suggested “quick fixes” and longer-term solutions for each one.

Customer centred improvements

Our Service Usability scorecard gave the DSB team a prioritised and actionable set of solutions to focus on, which they have been able to schedule against available resources. Many of the recommendations made during the project have been backed as part of a multi-million euro investment into improving the customer experience over 4 years. As a result of working together the team is now able to use our Service Usability methodology to focus on other areas of their business.

“Working with live|work has been a rewarding learning experience for DSB. To my immense satisfaction live|work is at the same time very attentive to clarity and brevity in presentations – and really pleasant and professional people to work with!”
Mikael Fuhr  Head of Design Vision Lab at Danish Railways (DSB)

November – December 2007

www.dsb.dk