Rail Delivery Group delivers services that make rail travel simpler and more reliable, from journey planning and ticketing to data systems and industry collaboration.

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.

The 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.

Our 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

The 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.

Key Outcomes