Services provided to rail passengers
We offer a range of services to help rail passengers travel by train.
Contact Centre - 08457 48 49 50
The telephone service provided by National Rail Enquiries is the busiest telephone number in the United Kingdom.
Call answering statistics
Between 1st April and 31 March 2009:
| Number of calls offered | 16,058,777 |
| Number of calls answered | 15,153,487 |
| Percentage of calls answered (PCA) | 94.4% |
| Average time to answer calls (ATTA) | 21 seconds |
NRE has two contact centres – one in Wath-upon-Dearne, South Yorkshire and one in Mumbai, India. Both are operated by a third party supplier on their behalf.
The contact centre advisers have the very latest technology at their finger tips – the Contact Centre Journey Planner (CCJP) gives advisers the same consistent information that is available to passengers on the website including availability of Advance tickets and ‘replanning’ of disrupted journeys.
High Quality Information
Combining this new technology with a passion in providing the highest quality services, NRE have seen a significant increase in the success measures. Using external and impartial auditors, NRE monitor the contact centre service in the following ways:
Customer Satisfaction
- An independent company conducts a continuous survey on customer satisfaction monthly. The latest survey result done between January 09 and March 09 was 90% of our customers would recommend NRE to family and friends.
Mystery Shopping
- The world's leading independent mystery shopping company, Taylor Nelson Sofres conducts mystery shop calls to each of NRE's call centres. For the period covering 12th October 2008 to 31st March 2009, NRE answered 99.29% of calls correctly on this measure.
National Rail Enquiries Website
The National Rail Enquiries website was launched in 2003, and offered passengers train time and fare information.
Since the website was launched, many new features have been introduced:
Real Time Journey Planner – www.nationalrail.co.uk
The Journey Planner allows users to find the best journey options between any two National Rail locations. Using complex rules to find suitable journeys, the latest release of the Journey Planner allows users to:
- plan a journey to, from and via any National Rail location
- quickly see if their journey is being disrupted (on the day of travel) and choose to see suitable alternative journeys
- register to receive SMS text message alerts about delays to trains – either as a ‘one off’ request or for the same trains over a longer period of time
- view availability of ‘quota controlled’ fares, so the customer knows exactly what tickets are available at the time of the enquiry
- search for a specific fare for trains over a range of dates, on which a specific fare is available
- find comprehensive ticket terms & conditions, as well as ticket route information - the customer knows when and where the ticket can be used
- discover special offers that may be associated with the requested journey
- see the range of add-on fares – such as London Travelcards – that may be available
- produce their own personalised [/pockettimetable ‘Pocket Timetable’] which they can print out and carry with them
- insert the train times into a calendar system, like Microsoft Outlook
- find the prices of season tickets for appropriate journeys for seven days and any period between one month and a year.
The journey planner is available to users of WAP and PDA devices.
Live Departure Boards – livedepartureboards.co.uk
National Rail Enquiries’ Live Departure Boards service is a web-based representation of the departure and arrival line up for every station on the National Rail network. Using information from Darwin, it provides scheduled, expected and actual train times.
Additionally, if bus or boat services are included in the timetable system for the station, the scheduled departures are also shown within the Live Departure Boards display.
Being web based, Live Departure Boards offers users a flexible and easy to use interface. Users can see the current situation at a particular station or navigate to get full information about a specific train.
Live Departure Boards is available to users of WAP and PDA devices.
Text message alerting
NRE offer a simple web and text-based solution to easily inform passengers of delays or cancellations of specific trains.
The Darwin-powered SMS alerting service allows customers to easily choose the trains to be updated about, and once they have selected a few simple options about when they’d like to receive the alert, the customer can sit back and relax in the knowledge that should anything happen to the running of their train, they’ll receive a SMS text message to let them know.
Knowledgebase
The National Rail Enquiries Knowledgebase offers user a wealth of useful information about rail travel.
There are two versions of Knowledgebase – through the website to customers and to staff in contact centres and tickets offices across the network.
NRE have developed a range of simplifiers to help front line staff in booking offices and telesales/customer service centres handle enquiries from the travelling public.
Features include:
- the same information available to customers about service disruption and engineering work
- access to the National Rail Station Facilities database
- detailed information about Special Offers and Ranger & Rovers
- a calendar of events affecting the National Rail network
- a diary page, giving continuous updates of issues affecting railway retailing
- a GroupSave simplifier and diary to help advisers sell GroupSave tickets and be aware when GroupSave has been barred for travel
- an Excess Fares calculator, to help advisers understand and calculate excess fares
LISA, the Virtual Assistant
‘Lisa’ is a state of the art Virtual Assistant – the world’s first video-based assistant. She is available on the National Rail Enquiries homepage for customers to use 24-hours a day, 365 days a year.
- What does Lisa do?
Working for National Rail Enquiries, she has extensive knowledge about travelling by train – from helping choose the best ticket for a journey, to telling customers about the facilities that are available at all National Rail stations. She can even take a customer’s journey information and plan a journey for them in the web-based Journey Planner!
She can now interrogate the wealth of information in the station information database, and give no answer customers directly about the facilities at stations across the network.
- How good is she?
Lisa is always learning. She started working for National Rail Enquiries in July 2007 and has developed a huge knowledge of things to do with the railway.
NRE regularly review the conversations that Lisa has with people, so they know where there are gaps in her knowledge. On average, she currently answers over 94% of rail-related questions correctly – no mean feat for a computer powered virtual assistant!
- Is she busy?
Lisa can have conversations with many customers at a time - she is the busiest and most functional Virtual Assistant on the planet. She speaks to an average of 2,500 customers and answering nearly 10,000 questions every day, dealing with very complicated enquiries for customers including planning journeys in the web-based Journey Planner.
During the week of the severe snow fall in February 2009, she spoke to 31,151 customers and answered 125,844 questions!
- What’s she got planned?
She will soon be able to streamline the online complaints procedure, reducing the impact of emailed complaints to the Customer Relations team.
TrainTracker™ - 0871 200 49 50
TrainTracker™ uses the latest in speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies to provide an automated enquiry service. You can call TrainTracker™ on 0871 200 49 50.
It allows callers to:
- plan any journey within the next 12 weeks
- plan multi-leg journeys
- hear ‘real time’ service disruption information, with information taken directly from Darwin, presented using the latest ‘text-to-speech’ technology
- ‘replan’ a journey should one or more of the trains be delayed or cancelled
- hear details of available tickets and fare options for all journeys on the National Rail network
- be transferred to a National Rail Enquiries adviser if they need help or be transferred to the appropriate telesales department to buy a ticket, if they choose.
The success of TrainTracker™ is clear - 85% of callers would recommend it to their family and friends.
And whenever TrainTracker™ struggles to understand what callers say, the call is automatically flagged for review. The service is continuously updated to improve performance, including improved recognition of regional accents and dialects.
If TrainTracker™ is unable to recognise the caller, callers can use their telephone keypad to input their request or be transferred to a National Rail Enquiries Customer Advisor to handle their enquiry.
TrainTracker™ Text
TrainTracker™ Text offers the same robust journey planning system as the web-based Journey Planner and TrainTracker™ services, but through text message to a mobile telephone. Users can receive train times from three hours in the past to twenty-one hours in the future.
Simply text your journey details to 8 49 50, using station name or codes and the time.
Examples
- For the next few departures from a particular station:
- dep [station name/code]
(Example: dep leicester or dep rdg)
- dep [station name/code]
- For the next few arrivals at a particular station.
- arr [station name/code]
(Example: arr leicester or arr rdg)
- arr [station name/code]
- Advanced Request – as above, but add one or more of the following:
- to/from [station name/code] - for the next few departures from a particular station, to or from a particular station
(Example: dep leicester to leeds or dep rdg to pad)
- to/from [station name/code] - for the next few departures from a particular station, to or from a particular station
- Simply add a time (hhmm) to show trains after a certain time.
Results
Send the following to 8 49 50:
"dep KGX"
|
"dep Manchester to Euston"
|
Notes:
If no bracket shown, the train is as scheduled (or may not yet have departed the origin station). |
National Rail Enquiries for iPhone
The application enables iPhone users to plan rail journeys between stations anywhere across the National Rail network using our powerful Journey Planner. It will also show, within the results up to the minute details of delays, cancellations and disruptions and the effect they are likely to have on planned journeys.
And that’s not all, National Rail Enquiries for iPhone offers a host of other services including:
- The ability to view live departures and arrivals at all National Rail stations and live train progress information including, where available, the platform number each train will be using
- Journey Planner search results are automatically saved in the iPhone so they can be viewed when mobile network coverage is not available
- If a connection is cancelled or running late the Journey Planner will suggest an alternative train or route
- iPhone maps provide clear directions showing the quickest route from the customer’s current location to the nearest station anywhere in the UK
- Customers can store their favourite stations in the iPhone, so they are quickly available at the touch of a button
- Using GPS technology to locate the nearest stations to where the customer is currently located, a quick click and the station can be selected as the origin or destination
- Once the customer has set their ‘home station’, clicking the “Next Train Home” button will use GPS technology to find their nearest station and give them details of the next few trains home.
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