Success Story – ÖBB (Austrian Federal Railways)
How does the state-owned railroad group and Austria’s largest mobility and logistics service provider ensure a high level of service?
Exponentially increasing
Call volume managed
with the smart algorithms for ÖBB
(Österreichische Bundesbahnen)
As a mobility service provider, ÖBB transports around 477 million passengers and approximately 94 million tons of goods to their destinations every year in a climate-friendly and environmentally friendly manner. For the company’s own service center, this means ever new challenges. With virtualQ, a significant reduction in redialing was realized in addition to efficient peak smoothing.
Challenge
- Major call peaks at peak times and inefficient use of existing capacity
- Large number of redials, which additionally increase call volume and hence waiting times
- The course of the inbound volume is to be viewed holistically and the planned callbacks are to be set up accordingly
- The solution must be flexible and easy to use, to be adapted as needed
Goal
- Create positive customer experience with maximum efficiency
- Smooth out the contact peaks in telephone contact and distribute them evenly throughout the day
- Use intelligent callback system for best employee utilization
- Greatly reduce waiting time for customers.
Result
- Live in 2 weeks without IT effort
- Proof of Concept (PoC) achieved after 4 weeks
- Positive ROI and Point of Value (PoV) achieved after only 6 weeks
- Up to 70% less churn
- >10% less workload due to peak smoothing
- >10% efficiency & performance increase
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Call storm in the morning, call slackness in the evening
Until 2019, ÖBB regularly experienced the same phenomenon. At peak times, the agents could barely handle the many calls. Additionally, there were a high number of repeat dialers who called multiple times if they didn’t get through right away. As a result, the call volume increased exponentially. During off-peak hours, on the other hand, agents were underutilized and therefore inefficiently deployed.
To overcome these hurdles, ÖBB relied on virtualQ. By means of an intelligent callback system and additional web widgets, peaks should be actively managed in order to increase efficiency.
Virtual waiting instead of queuing
By shifting the call load with the help of virtualQ software, periods of particularly high stress levels for employees and long waiting times for customers could be eliminated.
Callers now know when they can expect a callback and that the person they are talking to already knows what the call will be about.
Excellent utilization
Callback connects callers with agents via prioritizationin the ACD. Contrary to expectations, this does not result in any additional work for the agents. These make the callbacks in exactly the same way as conventional calls, except that they are not all received at once.
This keeps agents consistently busy throughout the day, while callers save themselves valuable time and nerves.
Individual adjustments
virtualQ’s algorithms automatically determine the appropriate time for a callback. Nevertheless, ÖBB used some manual settings. For example, the time after which callers are sent to virtualQ’s virtual queue can be adjusted.
“The flexible handling of the tool allows us here to question these settings again and again and to adapt them if necessary, whereby the experienced team from virtualQ always supports and advises us perfectly,” says Alfred Wimmer from ÖBB Customer Service.
