Southeastern have just launched a new website developed by Imaginet to improve access to passenger information.
Vince Lucas, service delivery director said,
"Last winter we saw the worst weather for over 30 years which caused significant disruption to the train service. Whenever we have a period like that we will always review how we performed and see where we can improve. Like any organisation we are learning and adapting all the time. This is a continual process and the changes to the website today are a step towards providing more help for passengers during these periods."
After the winter Southeastern consulted with stakeholders and passengers on what they thought was done well and more importantly what could be improved. The website changes today are putting into place some of the recommendations from that review.
One of the main areas which has been improved is email 'travel alerts'. The new alerts for registered users are now more frequent and can be tailored to individual’s needs. Regular commuter can receive updates for their train each morning and evening before they leave the home or office between set times.
The website has also been re-built to ensure that during extremely busy periods of heavy usage it remains available and is less likely to 'crash' or 'time out'. So now, when many thousands of people are trying to access the site at once they should be able to access all the information on the website.
Other improvements to the website include:
- Improved live running information – Allow passengers to select a specific journey to see whether the service is running on time
- Live running 'ticker' – Up to the minute ticker tape moving text across the website for easy to see disruption information
- Improved timetable information – look-up tool to find the relevant timetable from your station; ability to create your own personalised timetable
- Station information – look-up tool to provide access to information on a particular station
- Dedicated disruption address – a dedicated link to allow passengers to access service running information quickly
"We are always looking at ways to improve our service and accept that we can always improve how we provide information. This is the first in a series of changes we will be introducing over the coming months to ensure that by next winter passengers will hopefully see an improvement," Vince Lucas concluded.
