Major passenger railroad delivers first‑class customer service with Nuance
Discover how Nuance omnichannel customer engagement solutions enable rapid agent support and convenient self‑service.
Customer support, whenever and wherever
A major passenger railroad service wanted to make it as easy as possible for its customers to get in touch anytime, anywhere—at home, planning their trip, or already in their seat speeding towards their destination. Read the story to learn how Nuance helped.
Challenge
A passenger railroad service wanted to create effortless engagement experiences for its customers at every point in the journey—from the initial planning to their return home.
Solution
Using Nuance Proactive Engagement, Nuance Cloud IVR, Live Assist, and Virtual Assistant, the passenger railroad service offers customers rapid agent support and convenient self‑service options across its website, mobile app, voice channel, and SMS.
Results
With railroad’s wide range of engagement options, customers can now easily get the support they need, whenever, wherever they desire—even in areas where internet access is limited.
Background
A major passenger railroad service is famous for connecting America with railroad and bus services that span 46 states and link 500 destinations. To help make its passengers’ journeys effortless, the passenger service provider is constantly investing in every stage of its customers’ experiences.
The iconic brand wanted to make it as easy as possible for its customers to get in touch, whatever their channel of choice, and wherever they were—at home, planning their trip, or already in their seat speeding towards their destination.
Support at every step of the customer journey
With a long‑standing partnership with Nuance’s Professional Services, the passenger service provider has implemented Nuance IVR, Virtual Assistant, Live Assist, and Proactive Engagement to enable effortless conversations at every stage of customers’ sales and service journeys.
And using Nuance solutions, they have also managed to deliver standout automated service to customers on its voice channel, website, and its mobile app.
Meet the passenger service provider’s intelligent virtual assistant
The transportation provider’s virtual assistant was first introduced to the brand’s voice channel more than ten years ago. The assistant now offers support across all of their SMS using Nuance’s Natural Language Understanding capabilities to capture customers’ intents as they type freely in their own words.
The virtual assistant can currently provide train status updates and help with customer inquiries like navigating the website, schedules etc. The containment rates are currently ~23% and growing, allowing customers to self‑serve efficiently, therefore reducing costs and freeing up agents to manage more complex inquiries.
Customers can even start conversations with the virtual assistant over SMS, whether they need to ask for new copies of their tickets, get travelling advice, or report a problem. “We’ve put up signs across our trains and stations encouraging people to contact us on SMS if they need support,” says the Director of Information Technology. “For example, if a customer notices a train’s air conditioning isn’t working, they can notify us, and we can get a team member to fix it at the next station.
Proactive on‑the‑go assistance
The passenger railroad also wanted to provide proactive support for customers as they’re travelling, sharing service alerts that might affect their plans, and helping them make last‑minute changes to their journeys.
As part of this initiative, the rail provider uses Nuance Proactive Engagement to engage customers via SMS and allow them to respond with any questions simply by texting back a reply. And over the last year there were more than 12M proactive updates via email, SMS and voice.
Customer replies to these SMS notifications are initially handled by the virtual assistant, offering fast responses. But for cases that can’t be solved by the virtual assistant, the customers’ conversations are seamlessly escalated to a live agent directly within the same SMS channel.
Unmatched outcomes
68%+
CSAT over one year with Live Assist
12M
proactive updates via the customer’s preferred channel
85s
or less wait times, well under the industry average
Empowered agents offer effective web support
When customers are at home—or in any location with an internet connection—they can interact with railroad’s agents using Nuance Live Assist, a convenient live chat option on the brand’s website.
On the web chat application, their agents have access to the same capabilities as they do on SMS, but with the added ability to process transactions, and to help customers navigate the company’s website. The passenger railroad is seeing ~14% steady conversion rates through this channel with overall ticket sales growing significantly—all while wait times are roughly one minute and 25 seconds, well under the best‑in‑class average of two minutes.
“Our ‘co‑browse’ feature in Nuance Live Assist allows agents to help customers through the reservation process,” says the Director of Information Technology. “Agents can see what the customer sees, making it easier to help the customer complete their booking than if they engaged on our phone channel.”
Also, if a customer is logged in as they engage with the service, agents can see relevant details about their account, such as their reservations and chat history, to deliver even more effective assistance.
Even brighter customer journeys ahead
The railroad’s investment in customer service continues to expand with a planned migration to Conversational IVR with Nuance Mix, which will drive additional cost savings, allow customers to engage in their natural speech and make and change reservations more quickly. These enhancements will allow the IVR to handle inquiries about frequently asked topics, which are currently reaching agents—and will free them to handle more complex requests.
Nuance Mix, our omnichannel conversational AI tooling platform, will allow the passenger transportation giant to build new features across its voice, and digital channels as its customers’ needs evolve, delivering consistently innovative experiences into the future.
“Using Nuance Mix will help us future‑proof our engagement channels, allowing us to update our customers’ journeys as their needs evolve. It also gives us the flexibility and control to quickly make changes ourselves—which is crucial in an industry like ours, where travel conditions can change on a daily basis.”
—Director of Information Technology