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Case Study: Nexus Call Centre

Building an Urban DRT Service

Snapshot:

Type of operation: Multi-modal regional transport services including door-to-door, PTS ,Social Services and DRT
Number of specialized vehicles: 30
Registered clients: 20,000
Trapeze products used: PASS, FLEX, MON/MDC, mobile computing applications and integration with mobile data units
Trips per year: 350,000
Calls per month: 60,000
IT Environment: 15 workstations running MS-SQL over Citrix
Calls answered within 30 seconds: 97.5%

Business Problem

Nexus is the passenger transport executive (PTE) responsible for transport in the Tyne and Wear region of England. In addition to operating a light rail and ferry service, Nexus oversees the commercially operated public bus routes in the region and runs Nexus Care, a door-to-door service for residents who cannot use conventional transport. Nexus also manages Traveline, a regional transport information service covering all of northeast England.

In 2002, Nexus received funding to establish an urban demand response transport (DRT) service in west Newcastle. “We recognized at this point that we would need to consolidate our call centres”, recalls John Usher, the call centre customer service manager. “We had one centre for the Care services, another in a different location for Traveline and were about to build a third for UCALL, the DRT service”.

Goals

Nexus decided to build a multifunction call centre where staff from the three divisions could share resources and spend more time on customer care and less time on administration. “Our benchmark is to answer 90 percent of incoming calls within 30 seconds,” Usher explains. “We needed to be able to deliver all of the information passengers require, including fares, timetables, journey planning, DRT journey booking, and special needs information. To do this, we needed to harness technology to bring extra benefits to our customers and drive the growth of our call centre and our services”.

Solution

Nexus decided to install Trapeze PASS to automate the booking, scheduling, dispatch and client management for its door-to-door service. Ten percent of the region’s residents are unable to use conventional transport, and Nexus handles 2,500 calls per week for its 20-vehicle Care fleet.

“PASS allows us to create an extensive database of all our service users, taking into account regular journeys, pick-up and drop-off points and special needs. Previously, we scheduled the service manually; with PASS, staff spend more time responding to customers’ calls”, Usher says.

To manage the new UCALL service, Nexus chose Trapeze FLEX, an application that routes its four DRT vehicles to handle 1,000 journeys per week. “UCALL is one of the first applications of DRT in an urban context in the UK”, he says. “We built it from scratch in just seven months and now have 1,500 registered clients”.

Results

In May 2002, Nexus opened its consolidated call centre and the next month launched its UCALL DRT service. “PASS and FLEX automatically generate schedules and itineraries based on staff input and GIS databases”, Usher says. “Once a booking has been scheduled, the data is sent to in-vehicle Petards mobile data computers. The Windows CE devices have colour touch-screen displays and use GPRS communications to interface with the Trapeze software”.

Operators accept bookings and the system monitors the delivery of the journey. Customers are automatically allocated to either the UCALL or Care service depending on available resources at the time of the trip. Since implementing the system, denials of service have been significantly reduced from approximately 10 percent to less than 2 percent. This reduction of denials has been achieved despite an increase in requests for service and a reduction in the size of the fleet.

The centre receives approximately 12,000 calls per week with 97.5 percent being answered within 30 seconds — far exceeding the benchmark of 90 percent. Staffing has been streamlined as well. The call centre is open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week and receives 60,000 calls per month.

By consolidating the services, Nexus is able to overlap its 41 staff on three teams. They have been able to reduce by half the number of schedulers from 12 to 6 while increasing the number of journeys scheduled. “This allows for the best use of resources and also makes for a fulfilling working environment”, Usher says.

Because the PASS and FLEX systems allow Nexus to schedule journeys more efficiently, they have reduced the number of vehicles from 27 to 21. The associated cost reductions has allowed Nexus to take on additional contracts and provide more transport services in the region

Recent Developments

Nexus continues to improve mobility and access to transport in the Tyne and Wear region by supporting additional demand responsive services through its centralised call centre. They are planning to work with additional community transport operators to widen access to door-to-door service.
In October 2004, Nexus was awarded a contract to provide call centre services for a rural DRT service offered in Northumberland County. The PTE is also working with local authorities to assist with the scheduling of Special Needs Education transport and Age Concern programmes.

In January 2005, Nexus undertook a new contract with the North Tyneside Council to provide transport for their Social Services Adult Service fleet. Nexus manages journey booking and scheduling of this service through the centralised facility using PASS software, while the North Tyneside Council provides the vehicles and drivers.

Nexus works with a variety of transport operators in the Tyne and Wear region. To provide their partners with convenient access to the back office and traveller information systems outside of normal business hours, they recently moved their operations to a Citrix environment. Commercial operators can now access the booking and scheduling systems using thin-client technology while management of the system remains centralised.

To further enhance customer service, Nexus is also planning to implement a new personalised customer information solution for their fixed route service and integrate it with the existing call centre. This system will include software that enables customer service representatives to respond quickly to schedule and route queries and provide travel itineraries, and a Web module that enables passengers to enter their origin, destination and preferences and plan their own journeys.

The Bottom Line

“The technology provides the flexibility of operation essential to the successful delivery of a demand responsive transport system”, Usher says. “The multifunctional nature of the call centre provides a tailor-made service ranging from initial enquiries about public transport schedules through to individually customised trips”.