Life at The Routing Company: Guillermo Casares on the power of TRC’s Ops Team
In our “Life at The Routing Company” series, we feature people across our team that power TRC’s customer deployments around the world. In this edition, we're highlighting Guillermo Casares, our General Manager for the European region.
In his role as GM on TRC’s Global Operations Team, Guillermo (or "Gui" for short), is fully dedicated to ensuring customer success. He works closely with our partners (customers) from planning through to launch, to ongoing operational support, expansion, and beyond. Gui’s dedication, attention to detail, and passion for the industry is part of why TRC's steadfast focus on delivering exceptional customer experience has earned industry-leading NPS scores – what we affectionately call "customer love".
Read on to learn more about Gui's day-to-day at TRC, and his perspective on how we can improve mass mobility around the world.
What do you do at The Routing Company?
Today, TRC’s Pingo platform powers transport services delivered by partners across the Netherlands, Andorra, Scotland, and England. As General Manager for Europe, I help our partners meet the goals they’ve set for their services – whether improving employee access to a remote harbor in the Rotterdam area (our partnership with RMC in Schiedam, The Netherlands), offering a more flexible transportation option for an older population in The Hague, The Netherlands, or keeping residents connected to their community in a principality nestled in the Pyrenees mountains in Andorra.
In practice, this means I am the main point of contact – and a listening ear – for our European partners. I offer guidance on how to use Pingo to its full potential for each service: from implementation, through service redesign, to expansion opportunities when partners want to scale the service to new regions. I also help evaluate progress through data analysis, using our Pingo Analytics product.
Internally, my interactions reach beyond operations, working closely with our Product team, for instance. I am the conduit of partner feedback, to help ensure we’re iterating our products to best serve their needs. My role also requires me to keep up to date on “everything TRC”, to inform our partners on relevant upcoming product features and where our Pingo platform could take them next.
What does an average TRC day look like for you?
Every day is different. The on-the-ground particularities of working in operations at TRC allows me to meet diverse, amazing people who help others move. For example, I meet drivers who are artists in their free time, and others who get into driving because they love the open road. I am constantly meeting people in the transportation industry and beyond from municipalities, private organisations, taxi companies, touring operators and more – all with valuable insights about what the quality of a public transport service really means in practice.
Those daily interactions are not only inspiring, they also offer a wealth of knowledge that helps us fine-tune our products for all our partners. Leveraging insights from our 32 deployments as a tool for product innovation is at the core of what we do. Sharing learnings about rider growth, service design, or parameter optimisation, means partners benefit greatly from what we are learning from programs close and far from them.
Each of my on-the-ground interactions stand out as unique and valuable moments to gain insights on partner deployments.
What is, or has been, your personal experience with public transport?
My first job in 2012 in Celaya, Mexico, required me to take a taxi every Monday at 4 am to the airport to board an intercity bus. Hailing a taxi was unreliable, so I would often miss the transfer. I became aware that in many places, access to a car is synonymous to job opportunities.
My interest in public transport can be traced back to that first experience, sparking the wish to reduce the need for car ownership. Single-occupancy vehicles are a huge contributor to environmental and social challenges – and also it just sucks to be stuck in traffic. I want to help individual people move with as little friction as possible, in a way that supports mobility for the wider community.
With a team spanning ten countries that collectively speaks 16 languages, TRC is uniquely positioned to understand and advance efficient mass mobility at scale.
As CEO James Cox highlighted in his year in review, recent Pingo™ data demonstrated a remarkable 31% of our trips occur in place of single occupancy vehicle trips, meaning more cars taken off the road. Since joining TRC, I’ve been working with companies that share the same North star: providing a reliable, efficient, and affordable transportation alternative – whether in the form of flexible alternative transport options, shared employee transport, paratransit, shuttle, on-demand, and more.
So what still excites you now about working at The Routing Company?
Few tech companies allow such direct interaction with customers. In our case, TRC’s partners are ultimately the voice of (public) transport riders. From this, I get a real insight into how our solutions can continue enhancing the efficiency, responsiveness, and quality of the services we deploy, and consequently, lead to a better user experience and more connected communities.
One of our partners in the United Kingdom, for instance, West Sussex County Council, recently celebrated the expansion of its demand-responsive transport system for those living or working in the county’s rural areas with limited or no traditional bus service. Councillor Joy Dennis, Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport noted “The flexibility this service provides helps keep our residents in rural areas connected with their communities and provide continued access to any essential and leisure services they may need.” Mobility isn’t a luxury, it’s a critical lifeline for many in communities around the world. This is a rally cry that’s easy to get behind, because every person in every community should have the opportunity to access transport.
What is one opportunity you see for the public transport industry?
We don’t just need top-tier innovations into the most high-end electric vehicles or radical bike use. Starting with generating value for public transport systems has immense potential.
In Europe, I’ve seen how on-demand transport integrations help feed into and bring existing services to life. TRC’s Transit Connect™ and Transit Protect™ products do just that, ensuring that on-demand transport doesn't operate in a vacuum from existing routes. Whether fixed bus lines, trains or ferries, giving attention to existing networks is what strengthens them.
This is exactly what we’re focused on at TRC. Providing more accessible and efficient transportation, while strengthening and fortifying existing transport networks. We’ve made some very exciting progress over the past few years, but we’ve still got so much more ahead. I look forward to our upcoming launches in 2024.
