Making Bus Selection Easier
If you have traveled by bus anytime, you will know that a number of things need to go right for you to have a very good travel experience. For starters, you should be able to locate the correct boarding point, track the location of the bus, the bus itself should be of good quality and you should arrive at your destination on time.
For the last 16 years, redBus has been on a mission to ease these pain points for bus travelers. We help the travelers to select the right bus, help them to navigate to the exact boarding point, enable them to track the live location of the bus, and much more!
But out of all of these, in my opinion, the most important aspect is empowering the users to choose the right bus, with the least effort.
Hence I would like to dedicate this blog to capture some of the key things we worked on, in the year gone by (2022), from the Product Management side, to improve the users’ ability to choose the right bus with minimum hops (backs and forths) in the booking funnel. The North Star Metric for all of these initiatives was to reduce the Average Session Duration of the Sessions with Transactions.
Choose the Right Bus with Ease!
- Travelling Solo? We Got You Covered!
Majority of the users that book bus tickets on redBus, travel solo. And hence they have a strong affinity towards booking Single Seats. Single seats are the ones with a window on one side and aisle on the other, thus ensuring privacy and also instilling a sense of safety.
We realized just how important a factor it is, when during the user research calls, many travelers (especially female solo travelers) indicated that not finding a single seat is a deal breaker for them.
So what did we do about it? Two things.
Firstly, on each search result tuple, we started displaying the number of available single seats in addition to the total number of seats.
Secondly, we introduced a filter for “Single Seats”. On applying this filter, users will only see those buses with at least 1 single seat still available to book. To improve adoption of the feature, a coach mark (as shown in the screenshot below) was shown to the users in their first 2 sessions, post the launch of the filter.
And it worked like a charm! 🙂 This filter option is now one of the most widely used filters.It gets used in more than 5% of the sessions!
2. Being On-Time Is Important
I have been with redBus for close to 7 years now. And over these years, I have seen instances where bus delays have led to terrible situations for our customers like missed connecting flights, denied entry to examination halls, business opportunity losses!
We understand the importance of being on time. And the buses that deliver on the time commitment, deserve a special mention on redBus. Hence we launched a feature to give a special ‘On-time’ callout in the booking funnel, to buses with good on-time performance.
We had a solid lead in this direction since most of the buses available on redBus platform are GPS enabled, which makes it possible for us to keep a track of the time-stamps at which the bus crosses all the boarding points and dropping points during each trip that the bus undertakes.
So all we have to do is to mine this information, and pass it through a stringent set of rules to determine the on-time performance of each bus on our platform. This activity happens every day. And only the buses that meet the criteria of 80% on-time performance, win this tag!
3. What Do Others Like the Most About this Bus?
We have had Ratings & Reviews on our platform for a very long time. And they continue to play a very important role in the user’s decision making process.
This year we took it a notch higher, by mining all the reviews and finding that one attribute that the users like the most about a bus, and displaying it prominently in the booking funnel.
The kind of attributes that can get featured here are seat comfort, cleanliness of the bus, staff behavior among others.
4. The Destination Matters, but so does the Route
Say you need to travel from city A to city B. Most buses complete this journey via A->X->B, while a few go via A->Y->B. Oftentimes, these two routes are significantly different in terms of distance or the quality of the roads. So much so that, choosing the wrong route can negatively impact your travel experience.
Customers want to know about the route that the bus will take. This had been a recurring feedback during the customer surveys.
To solve this, we started working with our field team to get the list of all such routes where the via cities should be called out on the search results page. In the above example, since A->Y->B is the uncommon route, the buses passing through “Y” will get the callout, as shown below.
The next step here is to apply Data Science to automate the identification of such via routes.
So that was a quick recap of some of the key features launched in 2022 to make the bus selection easier for our users. These features have started showing positive movement in the north star metric that we had set for ourselves. We will keep doubling down on this agenda, and find newer ways to solve the problems faced by bus travelers, when it comes to choosing the right bus.
Hope you enjoyed reading this blog! If you have any feedback or suggestions, please provide your comments.
