Rail Delivery Group

Profile

Organisation: The National Rail brand is operated by the Rail Delivery Group (RDG). National Rail receives over 420 million user visits a year. National Rail Enquiries (NRE); which consists of call center, automated voice, desktop, mobile websites, and app services; is currently the only independent national source of rail information in the UK. It is a strategic enabler to train companies, providing comprehensive, impartial, journey planning and rail and station information to customers and industry colleagues. It covers services to and from over 2500 rail stations across the UK.

Challenge: Improving the delivery of information in order to answer customer inquiries and improve the traveling experience.

Solution: Self-service IVR for Station Connect and Journey Planner

Benefit:

• 24x7x365 real-time information relating to all journey planning
• Call center agents are free to handle more complex calls
• Peak volume spikes are more easily handled
• Reduces demand on the contact center during non-planned high peak call demands such as strikes, poor weather conditions and major disruptions.

Business

National Rail handles one of Britain's busiest transport telephone services with over 3 million customer calls per annum.

'Train Tracker' is the Journey Planner automated telephone solution which was developed by Eckoh in 2005. It covers all station locations including information for trains, metro, ferry, walking and bus transfers. Since 2005 the service has been refined and updated to reach very high customer satisfaction.

Challenge

RDG undertook a transformational contact strategy review to enhance the 24x7 service availability to its customers. This involved several key initiatives including the introduction of multi-channel inquiry services to complement the primary telephone inquiry line including web and mobile.

Their key requirements were to provide a consistent experience across all contact points for the traveling public and improve call handling efficiency.

Solution

Since the start of the relationship Eckoh has worked with RDG to develop several services which include:

Journey Planner, an IVR service where upon a caller providing their departure and arrival stations, the IVR will advise the caller of their optimum journey route. It provides personalized journeys for repeat callers. Eckoh also provides a customer satisfaction survey for callers to provide feedback on the Journey Planner service. Therefore, feedback is continuously monitored and feedback used for ongoing improvement.

Eckoh also worked with RDG to develop 'Station Connect'. This is an automated telephone system that routes all rail staff calls to stations where customer assistance is required on inbound or outbound trains

Value

In an average month, “Train Tracker” handles 16,000 calls. This adds up to an average of 500,000 minutes a year. As a hosted solution, it has the scalability to easily cope with any sudden increases in call volumes. At its busiest, it has dealt with over 100,000 calls in a single day.

Station Connect receives on average 5,000 calls per month.

The CSAT survey scores on average 96% satisfied with the information provided to callers

Introducing these services has enabled RDG to see a reduction in operations costs and has ensured that they can provide a better customer experience.

Looking Forward

To learn more about how Eckoh can support with your customer journeys across all engagement channels, please reach out to one of our trusted advisors.