#1 Printing vouchers and sending them
costs money to Turun Joukkoliikenne. The system the employers use to order
vouchers is unclear and hard to find from their website. After Turun Joukkoliikenne and the employer
have already gone through a lot of trouble, the employee who gets the vouchers
will have to go to Turun Joukkoliikenne at the center of the city to use the
vouchers to download a bus card using the coupons. Solution: eliminate the vouchers. Instead, when companies want to
subsidize employees transportation they would buy electronic vouchers, meaning that there is no concrete paper
voucher, but for example a code. Each of the purchased vouchers would only
exist as electronic information. They would be delivered electronically to the
HR personel of the employer, who could administrate coupons to employees vía
email. The use of codes would enable employees to use the voucher even when
paying their bus card online.
#2 Team Rocket has also heard that some
companies have decided not to use the vouchers because employees using private
cars have felt that they are being discriminated: not everybody has the possibility
to use the bus (not enough routes, wrong schedules, long walk to the nearest
bus stop, multiple tasks and stops on the way to work, like taking kids to kinder
garden), so why should people be rewarded for being able to use the bus? Solution: why should employees only be able
to use the vouchers for busses? How about vouchers that go for parking and maybe
for taking a taxi as well? As in the case of lunch vouchers that have partly
been replaced by lunch cards where money is uploaded when needed, also
työmatkaseteli could be replaced by a card with a microchip. Using a technology
like RFID would allow the city to attach this new function to its parking
meters without much trouble.
#3 We’d never heard of the
employer-subsidized tickets before Inno58. Not many employers use it either. Solution: Creative Marketing that reaches
employers and employees. Marketing needs to create both pull (demand from
the employees) and push (meaning supply of vouchers from employer’s side). It
will need to educate both employers and employees on the vouchers and make it
visible, whether it is the voucher in its current form or another solution that might replace it. It’s been rumored that the city is unwilling to spend money on
marketing personnel. Why not let a student team handle the marketing? Organize
a competition to plan the best marketing campaign for the vouchers. We’d be
happy to participate.
