How Reading Buses made one app the front door to everything

• Industry: Public transport
• Location: Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom
• Size: ~800 staff
• On Blink since: 2024
• Interviewed: Robert Williams, Chief Executive Officer

Making the case for one app over many

Reading Buses runs services across Reading and the Thames Valley, owned by Reading Borough Council. Its workforce of around 800 drivers, engineers, and head-office staff is rarely in the same place at the same time, which makes reaching everyone, reliably, a daily challenge.

The challenge

Like a lot of operators, Reading Buses started from a fair question. Why pay for a system when the tools everyone already has are free?

"We looked at Facebook and WhatsApp, and they're all free, aren't they? So why do we need to pay for another system?"

— Robert Williams, Chief Executive Officer, Reading Buses

The honest answer was that free tools weren't actually solving the problem. The information people needed every day, payslips, rosters, duty allocation, documents, was scattered across a pile of different apps, websites, and passwords. Nothing joined it up, and nothing proved a message had landed.

Why Blink

The value was never going to come from one feature. It came from bringing everything into one place, and from making that place somewhere people had a reason to open every day.

First, a regular heartbeat. The staff newsletter moved off email and onto Blink.

"When we first launched Blink, we realised that for it to be really effective we needed to do a few things. We transitioned our staff newsletter, which used to go by email, onto Blink, so there's that regular heartbeat."

Then came the part that made it stick: single sign-on to the systems people actually use.

"The real thing came when we added the single sign-ons. Payslips, our driver duty allocation system, so you can log straight in, and various other bits and pieces. It became that central hub for all the information people need on a daily basis, rather than having to use a multitude of different apps, websites, and passwords. It became that single source of information."

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The results

98% adoption, and an app people open three to four times a day. Moving the things drivers and staff genuinely need, pay and duties first, turned Blink from "another system" into the first thing they check.

The Hub does the heavy lifting. At around 45 opens per user a month, one of the highest figures anywhere, the Hub has become the front door to the whole operation. Payslips, the driver handbook, duty allocation, defect reporting, and more all sit behind a single login instead of a scattered set of apps and passwords.

One platform, not a pile of subscriptions. The return on investment wasn't a single feature. It was consolidation, and a workforce that now has one reliable place to go.

"We were skeptical. What convinced us was the wider benefits. It's not just one of those things on its own, it's that it brings everything together into one platform. Now we can point our employees to one place and say, if you need something, it's on Blink."

For Reading Buses, the payoff isn't a line item. It's everything in one place, opened every day, by nearly everyone.