Communicating with a mobile audience - Case study: Metroline Buses

The Client

A dynamic and ambitious transport company, Metroline is proudly serving London, one of the world’s busiest cities. Their principal business is the provision of bus services under contract to London Buses, operating through an area that extends from North to West London, including Central London and the City.

Every day Metroline strive to meet their passengers’ expectations, be it through good customer service, a clean and presentable vehicle or simply getting their customers to their destinations on time.

The Challenge

Metroline employees are constantly on the move, driving from depot to depot. This makes communication a real challenge. Irregular shift patterns and 24 hour a day staffing can make it difficult to communicate important legislation and safety announcements.

Metroline require a way of communicating with drivers when they arrive for their shift or whilst they stop for a break.

The Solution

Sabercom worked closely with Metroline to specify and provide an 11 site corporate digital signage system for communicating across all bus depots.

Placing screens in the reception and break out area of each depot allows for important messages to be read by each of the drivers.

Communication managers can broadcast important safety messages and update drivers on new legislation. A mix of travel and weather news means that drivers are constantly informed of any hazards that may occur during their shift.

Sabercom users at the individual depots can also control the content of their locations screen, this ensures that information is local and relevant.

The Sabercom system has proven to be one of the most important communication channels for Metroline. Sabercom's on-going relationship ensures that the solution is constantly evolving to meet their requirements.

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What does this communicate to your audience?

What a beautiful display and background image, shame about the error

I can't count the number of times when I visit a company or business and their expensive large screen has an error message smack in the middle of the display. I happened to see this one when I was on holiday in Lyon, France. 

The signage market is a challenging one - there are hundreds or more likely thousands of providers with different pieces of software, proprietary hardware and even companies reselling someone else's product. 

A large number of people simply use a PC connected to a LCD TV and update this manually using PowerPoint or similar software. So, someone has gone to the trouble of building a business case, securing budget for the procurement of expensive screens and even more expensive installation labour only to stop short on the software. 

The key for this channel to be successful is the regular flow of engaging messages to the screen. As an internal communicator you're already authoring lots of content elsewhere (on intranets, blogs, wikis, video platforms and others) Why not push some of the relevant content automatically to your internal TV, digital signage, corporate TV channels?

Many businesses don't look at this channel in isolation - they use it to augment other comms campaigns. For example, if you have a video on the intranet that's a must see, put a teaser up and tell people where they can view the whole video. During special events like the recent Olympics people displayed medal tables or popular events alongside key communications messages - the more engaging the peripheral content the more likely your messages are going to get read. Did you know that if the local weather is on a screen 80% of  people will look at it?

There are many ways to use the channel to augment other campaigns so have a think about engaging people with short, succinct messages designed for at-a-glance viewing. Posting a full news story isn't the way to go on large displays because people either won't or can't read the whole thing quickly. 

More importantly, make sure you're using a platform that's reliable, easy to use and can handle feeds from other business systems (intranet, CRM, company web sites). This way you can keep content up-to-date with the minimum of effort and avoid "double authoring".