Improving Customer Service Scalability for NEORide's Transit Agencies
NEORide engaged CapTech and Salesforce to implement a holistic solution leveraging Service Cloud, telephony, and integration to improve its customer service process.
Summary
NEORide, a multi-state alliance of more than 30 urban, suburban, and rural public transit systems, sought to use its collective buying power to unify and scale customer service capabilities for its member transit agencies.
NEORide engaged CapTech and Salesforce to implement a holistic solution leveraging Service Cloud, Amazon Connect telephony, and several transit-specific integrations to unify the customer database across nearby systems and improve customer service tools and resources to better serve riders across Ohio.
Challenge
Dedicated to promoting innovation in public transportation for agencies of all shapes and sizes, NEORide was looking to offer a best-in-class customer database and digital customer service processes and workflows. The objective of providing these tools was to create scalability and efficiency of customer service offered in a flexible way. The business case demanded a solution that could support a shared customer service model and individual customer service organizations embedded in NEORide’s member agencies.
Approach
The CapTech team collaborated with NEORide and five of its member agencies to implement Salesforce’s Service Cloud and Service Cloud Voice, using AWS Connect for telephony. The CRM solution enabled agents to answer customer calls directly in the Service Console using a customized call flow or process cases through the email-to-case and web-to-case channels that were also built with automated routing to the correct agency.
Shared case workflows and knowledge articles were implemented for all agencies to streamline digital processing while also allowing for customization of field values and case assignments for each specific agency.
The CapTech team integrated General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and Active Directory data via a Microsoft Azure solution to pre-populate dropdown menus for indicating stop, route, and driver data on cases. This integration should reduce call handle time, improve case accuracy, and ultimately speed up incident investigation.
The new system is also integrated with NEORide’s third-party transit vendors to retrieve customer data from their Automated Fare Collection (AFC) and Paratransit providers to make Salesforce the single database of all customer data for participating agencies. Each participating agency’s marketing platform (MailChimp or Constant Contact) was also integrated to enable customer communications utilizing CRM data.
Within months, NEORide’s Salesforce implementation expanded to include Experience Cloud to digitize Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Rider Applications and enable automated approvals, with fewer agency resources. Further, with NEORide as the administering organization of Salesforce, an Information Technology intake workflow was also built to allow NEORide and member agencies to procedurally track and resolve operations and maintenance requests of the solution over time. These two features allowed NEORide to leverage the Salesforce product for multiple use cases, reducing the need for additional systems and cost.
Results
NEORide and some of its member agencies’ first-ever customer service platform centralized customer data and automated manual processes, allowing staff members to focus on providing the highest level of service to customers. The project:
- Integrated five customer data sources into a singular database.
- Increased efficiency by automating ADA rider applications and approvals as well as routing and triage of customer cases.
- Created shared resources for multiple agencies to benefit from centralized knowledge articles to improve customer service, consistency of response, and reduce call handle time.
- Allowed for higher levels of customer service while lowering customer interaction time.
- Provided first-ever analytical dashboards for data-driven decision making based on call handle and case data.
- Delivered a best-in-class software solution that can scale for many business functions at a competitive price for multiple agencies who pooled their collective buying power.
