LAS VEGAS—First Student, the trusted school transportation and technology provider to millions of families across North America, is a T-Mobile Innovation in Customer Experience Award winner. The company was recognized for delivering new and enhanced service levels to school districts and creating a unique brand experience for its customers and student riders.
First Student’s award application highlighted the company’s use of cutting-edge technology across all its operations, including vehicle connectivity and driver tablets. It includes a behavior incident reporting application that allows quick, hands-free incident report capture and distribution to school districts and parents. Coupled with First Student’s behavioral training program, this seamless process and built-in intervention effectiveness tracking have decreased negative incidents on First Student vehicles by 27%.
“At First Student, our school district partners demand the kind of transparency and convenience that only our proprietary technology platform can provide; infusing it across our business supports us in accomplishing our mission of providing students with the best transportation experience,” said First Student CIO Sean McCormack. “We serve millions of families at tens of thousands of schools. Technology allows us to do our jobs better and improves the transportation experience every day. We are proud of our technology suite and what those innovations mean for the students we are entrusted with. We are honored to have that work be recognized by our partners at T-Mobile.”
First Student’s driver tablets, which run on the T-Mobile, incorporate GPS to offer turn-by-turn navigation, a voice-activated copilot, and improved route efficiency to optimize the performance of 46,000 school buses in 19,000 schools across North America. The system includes a driver scoring tool that enhances the overall safety of school transportation by identifying incidents like hard braking and rapid acceleration, allowing managers to spot trends and address any concerns. With the integration of the driver scoring technology, First Student has coached more than 19,000 drivers, resulting in:
- Decreased rapid acceleration decreased by 36%.
- Decreased hard braking by 40%.
- Decreased speeding by 43%.
- Decreased idling by 27%.
This award also recognizes the First Student’s school bus tracker app, FirstView, which provides school districts with a complete view of their fleet and allows them to drill down to view details on every route. More than 12,000 schools leverage FirstView to track their fleet and push communications to the more than 571,000 families who have downloaded the app. FirstView allows parents and guardians to track their students’ vehicles and set up a customizable geofence that alerts them when to head out to the stop.
T-Mobile announced its Innovation in Customer Experience Award during the Mobile World Congress in Las Vegas. First Student was recognized in the innovation in customer experience category. The award also includes a $10,000 donation to the Ronald McDonald House on the company’s behalf.
About First Student
As North America’s leading school transportation solutions provider, First Student strives to provide unmatched care and the safest ride to school to 5.5 million students every day. With a team of highly trained drivers, the company will complete 1 billion student trips during the 2024-25 school year. First Student delivers reliable, quality services, including full-service transportation and management, special-needs transportation, fleet electrification, route optimization, scheduling, maintenance, and charter services with a fleet of about 45,000 buses. For more information, visit firststudentinc.com.