TheTrainline
TheTrainline and Virgin Trains Boost Ticket Sales Efficiency with High-Tech Ears and Naomi's Friendly Voice.
- Region
- UK
- Alliance partner
- Cisco
- Solution
- Infrastructure and Security
- IT Transformation - Strategy and Architecture
- MSS Transformation
- Portals
Capgemini and Cable & Wireless successfully applied leading-edge techniques of Advanced Speech Recognition (ASR) and voice-data integration into TheTrainline sales centres which manage rail retailing for Virgin.
The result makes the whole experience of buying a train ticket quick and easy for the customer and efficient and more profitable for Virgin Trains.
Client Profile
Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Rail Group is one of the UK’s biggest and most innovative rail operator. Two contact centres, run by TheTrainline on behalf of Virgin Trains, are based in Edinburgh and Dingwall, Scotland and sell rail tickets for journeys within Britain by telesales and the Internet.
TheTrainline outsources the two contact centres employing some 300 full-time agents to customer management specialists, Vertex. The contact centres receive over 120,000 calls per week and sell more than £10 million of train tickets per month, making TheTrainline the biggest retailer of rail tickets in Britain.
Sales are by no means limited to tickets for Virgin Trains. The contact centres also provide information and sell tickets for all rail journeys in mainland UK, irrespective of train operator, either by phone or through theTrainline.com dedicated web-site.
Business Issues
Although the contact centres provided customers with a friendly, personal service and were boosting overall ticket sales, key areas for improvement had been identified. In particular efficiency, productivity and agent utilisation all needed to be increased and the cost per sale reduced.
Business and technology consultant Capgemini was asked to review business issues and propose a solution. In particular, Capgemini was called upon to examine the end-to-end business process within the contact centres and establish whether agents were properly supported by the right technology.
Capgemini started by questioning the high dependence of contact centres on one-to-one, customer-to-agent telephone conversations. Although this provided a highly personalised service, it was also resource-hungry, and therefore expensive.
Self service was an obvious solution, however many customers continued to prefer the telephone to internet, whilst traditional touch-tone IVR technology could not be used to capture complex travel information, for example travel destinations.
Solution
Clearly a better way had to be found, and one that was practical, cost-effective and popular with customers.
With its technology partner Cable & Wireless, Capgemini considered a number of solutions, including those that incorporated the latest developments in computerised speech recognition and voice-data integration. They quickly realised that with careful planning and the right selection and integration of technology, a virtual contact centre solution based on these components would be the most effective solution. The project - “Electra” - was launched.
Together, Capgemini and Cable & Wireless developed the UK’s first network-hosted Advanced Speech Recognition (ASR) and voice-data integration solution. This is how it works:
- Calls are answered by an automated system that requests details of a planned journey (from/to, date, time etc). The customer responds naturally, as if speaking to a friend.
- Speech recognition software records the detail provided by the customer and feeds it into data format within the IT system.
- The ‘demand’ data then triggers automatic and virtually instant retrieval of all ‘supply side’ information (e.g. train times, seat availability, ticket prices) from rail industry databases.
- The data is sent to the screen of the appropriate sales agent and within a few seconds the customer call is patched through to that same agent, using Cable & Wireless’s Intelligent Call Manager (ICM) platform. The sale is confirmed person-to-person, payment details are taken and the transaction is completed.
A number of complexities had to be factored into the final solution. This included the need to effectively distribute calls between the two contact centres, and a requirement to ‘fast-track’ any special customer needs - for ferry, sleeper or Eurostar tickets, for example - straight through to a human operator.
In major technical projects, effective partnership is as important as technological excellence, and Capgemini and Cable & Wireless worked closely to manage several leading-edge vendors, with spectacular results. These included Cisco, Nuance, Nortel Networks and Success-On-Hold.
A truly friendly, acceptable ‘voice of Virgin’ had to be discovered with an accent and style of speech that would be clear and popular with customers. TheTrainline selected Naomi Sachs from Success-On-Hold, an actress and voice artist with a style that complimented Virgin’s vibrant brand image. The voice-overs were recorded in Success-On-Hold’s fully digitised studios, with a team of experienced voice coaches and sound engineers, to ensure that all productions would successfully transfer to the ASR platform.
Capgemini provided a broad range of skills to deliver the project and integrate developed applications to the rail industry legacy systems. Elements included:
- supplier management
- project management and project office
- voice, business and technical consulting
- desktop development
- systems integration
- implementation management
-
applications management.
Adaptive IT is a strategic framework encompassing Capgemini’s technology capabilities. This was leveraged, deploying expertise and competencies from key service lines (Advanced Development & Integration, Technology Consulting and Business Process Management) to lead the project and design the solution. In addition, Applications Management services supported and ran legacy CRM systems from a dedicated centre.
The key to the success of the project was the highly effective partnership between TheTrainline and Virgin Trains, customer management company, Vertex, project managers Capgemini, Cable & Wireless and the other voice and technology partners involved.
Benefits
TheTrainline and Vertex who operate the contact centres on its behalf, confirm that they have won several vital benefits as a result of the project. These include:
- cost reduction of 20% through more efficient utilisation of agents and reduction in agent handling time
- service standards improved by over 10% through automatic load balancing above the level previously achieved through ratio planning
- improved conversion rates (ratio of ticket sales to enquiries) by freeing agents to focus on selling.
- very high, measured levels of customer satisfaction with the service delivered by the contact centres, including both perceived efficiency and ease of use; higher efficiency has been gained without sacrificing the quality of the customer experience
- the achievement of ‘virtual contact centre capability’, delivering all the benefits of a single call centre despite operating two physically separated centres, including the benefits of lower operating costs and easier scalability
- a single point of management for all contact centres, with excellent cost and efficiency implications
- accurate real time consolidated management information, giving managers the power to respond faster and better to any kind of change.
Written in co-operation with TheTrainline and Virgin Trains.
