Case Study: Thetrainline

Unplanned incidents affecting train times can leave travel operators confronted with the challenge of immediately informing hundreds of travellers of the situation and the impact it would have on their travel arrangements. Striving to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, thetrainline was occasionally faced with employing additional temporary staff or diverting the attention of their existing call centre team to focus on informing their customers of such incidents. This often had a significant financial impact on the business, whether through additional staffing costs or lost revenues.

Solution

To overcome this, thetrainline asked 2ergo to provide a messaging solution to communicate news alerts to affected travellers and for the information to be received instantly via both the mobile and fixed-line phones. 2ergo worked with thetrainline to introduce an outbound voice messaging service. Now, whenever there is a need to rapidly inform travellers, all thetrainline has to do is construct the message. The Multiserve Platform handles the scheduling and delivery of each outbound voice broadcast. Intelligent reporting allows thetrainline to track and view statistics relating to messages received and listened to.

Result

“Train companies are tasked with contacting people to give them service update announcements. However commuters don't like to be told bad news about strikes or lines not working, so we anticipated some complaints in reaction to hearing disruptions to their journey. In practice not only did we not receive a single complaint, we also managed to contact 75% of our customers at the first attempt. In addition, we saved around 30% on operational costs when compared to the previous method of calling people by phone” Jan Verbrugghe, thetrainline.