Shaping Business Recovery for a Post-COVID Economy
C&J Bus Lines, a regional transportation leader, chose InsightOut to accelerate business recovery with enhanced data visibility to adapt to changing consumer behavior and uncover new growth opportunities
For over 50 years, C&J Bus Lines, a family-operated business serving the New England seacoast community, has provided bus passengers with safe, reliable, and flexible transportation. In March of 2020, they suspended all transportation services as a public health and safety precaution. Five months later, they resumed service with new safety measures and transportation schedules in place.
While the company had long collected consistent passenger data — from frequency of purchase and purchase method to cancellations and re-bookings — through its transportation management system, they lacked the proper architecture to extract the data and fully take advantage of it. As they prepared for business recovery, C&J turned to Treehouse Technology Group (TTG) and its InsightOut platform for data-driven insights to better understand the shifts in consumer behavior and new revenue opportunities in a market landscape changed by COVID-19.
A key challenges C&J faced was having organizational data that was siloed in a system managed by a third-party software as a service (SaaS) provider.
“The question became: How can we take the data that we know we’re sitting on and convert it into something usable?” explains Brooks Jalbert, Customer Care Manager at C&J, “How can we extract insights that we know are there and create something that the whole team can engage with?”
Ultimately, C&J realized the best way to make the most of their data was to develop a custom data warehouse and automated analytics processes. The team approached TTG to implement a customized instance of InsightOut, enabling them to better utilize their repository of passenger information.
TTG was able to blend C&J’s previously fragmented data sources into a unified view and allow the team to more deeply engage with the ridership and ticketing data. InsightOut’s dashboard offers various filters to customize the data, providing insight into the most popular routes and method of ticket purchase. C&J can monitor and analyze the types of customers they are serving to identify customer trends and patterns. Such insights enable C&J to make more confident business decisions, backed by quantifiable metrics.
“We are now able to do ad-hoc queries and directly access the data warehouse created by InsightOut, which gives us great flexibility,” remarks Jalbert. “The system is reliable and the results are reliable, which has really given us momentum.”
InsightOut has facilitated greater discussion and incorporation of performance indicators in our routine strategy conversations. There is more sharing of easy-to-understand performance data at an organization-wide scale.
Brooks Jalbert
Customer Care Manager
A Data-Driven Future
With further systems and application integrations, C&J could incorporate more detailed operational data such as their buses’ on-time percentage, breakdowns, fuel costs, etc., which in turn could help them analyze how to cut costs. Or, with additional marketing integrations, C&J could better assess how customers are finding them, which keywords generate leads and conversions, and the effectiveness of coupon codes or targeted campaigns. These additional insights could further optimize resource allocation and enable their reach into new markets.
