BART serves over 400,000 riders daily and uses social media and cloud technology to handle regional challenges like homelessness and mental health in stations. Staff discuss how a small team can now do large-team work.
Over 400,000 riders every day.
May 15, 2019.
As long as I can move this train and keep it going and you can get from A to B when you want to, that's rewarding.
BART is the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, and we serve over 400,000 riders every day. Our mission is to provide reliable, safe, clean and customer friendly public transportation in the Bay Area. If you're not talking with your customers, you're failing your customers.
Traditionally, government asks people to show up to a public meeting on a Thursday morning in an office. We need to make sure that we're meeting people where they are so that we can be really active listeners to be able to understand how people are experiencing Bard and what they really want.
Us to focus on today. I would say safety is something that's top of mind for all of our writers. With the region struggling with a homeless crisis, with mental health problems where people aren't getting the services they need, those problems, they're starting to push themselves into our stations, onto our trains. As a transit agency, it's extremely difficult to figure out how do we solve that problem when our Bay Area regions haven't figured out how to solve it. And so that made us turn to social media. Naturally, because these conversations were taking place on social media, we're using Social Studio to see what are our customers asking us right now? What's going on in terms of service? Who do I need to reply to first? So we're actually humanizing our service instead.
Of being like, don't worry, everything's under control. We got this. We just told it straight. No longer did people feel like they were shouting into a void. They felt that there was someone coming to the table, meeting them where they were, and having a really just sort of honest and open and frank conversation.
When I came in, a lot of our systems were on premise systems. We looked at and said, we have to be nimble and we have to move as fast as our line of businesses and the region need us to move. The cloud gives you industry best practices and processes that you don't have to recreate.
I can track what people are talking about, and then if my marketing messages don't go back to those main themes, I'm talking about the wrong thing. Going to the cloud was a huge return on investment because we were able to have an extremely tiny team do the work of a large team.
A lot of people believe that it is a back office and it's the operations component, but something that we have worked together on is really bringing value not only to the district, but to our communities. I could see the voice of the customer. That's what got me excited.
I was just like, wow, if we're going to really be able to drive the changes that we need, we need to be so much more data driven by using all the talent and the creativity that are being developed in the private sector to make our government work better.
Being able to use technology to engage our writers on their time and on the topics they want to talk about, that's truly responsive government.
