Improve the user experience of bus passengers in Ivory Coast

“We were searching for a solution with secure mobile devices able to print & scan bus tickets. Famoco was the perfect go-to-market answer to give a better user experience to UTB customers.” – N’ZUE HILAIRE, Projects Director at UTB/ATH

A disordered ticket management

The first intercity bus network in Ivory Coast, UTB (Union des Transports de Bouaké), was created in the 1980s and counts today a fleet of nearly 300 buses that connect the country’s main cities. However, the UTB networks are subject to daily influxes of travelers, causing long queues for the purchase of tickets, forcing users to come 4 hours before bus departures.

This situation is harsh for users who use this transport network to get to work, forcing them to get up early to reserve a seat on the bus. Passengers who do not make it in time are then forced to turn back because of a limit of 60 seats per bus. UTB wished to improve the users’ experience by digitalizing the ticket sales service in order to shorten waiting time and facilitate access to their transport.

Transform digitally the ticket payment process

To meet the problem, SycaPay offered UTB a solution for digitizing ticket purchasing systems. This solution aims to make the user experience more fluid and to facilitate intercity connections. Thanks to SycaPay, users no longer need to go to the ticket office many hours before bus departures to buy their tickets.

Thanks to a digital reservation system, customers can now buy their tickets in mobile money at the ticket office or at a local store. Equipped with secure mobile terminals, the agent will print out the barcode ticket for them. Thus, passengers can arrive at the bus station 15 minutes before departure instead of 4 hours before the digital purchase. In this way, SycaPay’s solution drastically simplifies the daily life of UTB passengers.

Solving the problem with Famoco solution

This solution was possible thanks to the deployment of the PX400, Famoco’s mobile terminals with integrated printer, throughout the entire Ivorian transport network. With a printer integrated into the terminal and applications accessible from the touch screen, employees will accept payments in the queues to unblock them. Staff and customers, therefore, save a considerable amount of time thanks to the PX400s. The barcode on tickets is then scanned and validated at the bus entrance with an FX100 handheld terminal.

In addition, the secure Android OS (dedicated to businesses) and the Famoco MDM allow business apps to be deployed on the terminal for professional purposes, and then, improving employees’ productivity. They will subsequently no longer be able to access applications such as Facebook, YouTube, or WhatsApp from a professional terminal.

The MDM also offers administrators the possibility to manage terminals and update them remotely with just a few clicks. Agents who are not digital-friendly can, therefore, keep their terminals up-to-date without having to interact with them.

3 months after the launch, more than 20000 printed tickets

Thanks to this new system, transits through the UTB networks have become much more fluid, and the logistics have become simpler. “After 3 months of launch, we were able to count a total of more than 20 000 digital ticket reservations“, explains Hilaire N’zue, Project Director at UTB. To ensure the development of the transport company, nearly a thousand local stores will be equipped with PX400s over the next few months, and the number of buses in the fleet should increase. In that way, UTB and SycaPay estimate that more than 80 000 tickets will be sold by the end of the year.

About SycaPay

SycaPay is the West African leader in mobile payment applications, combining the worlds of telecommunications and banking. Their mission is to bring financial innovation and digitalisation to SMEs and African populations, to allow them a better financial inclusion. Also to enable them to take full advantage of the innovations induced by the smartphone. SycaPay’s main ambition is to connect the informal activities that characterise African economies. In particular with Syca Xpress, their new QRC and NFC payment app for the general public and merchants.

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