Now Assist for CSM boosts customer experience at Southeastern

About Southeastern

Southeastern Railway operates one of the busiest networks in the country, running over 1,700 trains a day across the South East of England, carrying 500,000+ daily passengers.

With so many daily customers, the Customer Relations team is an essential service to support people before, during, and after their train journeys. All customer queries, complaints and praise come through this team, which consists of 72 staff in contact centre roles and 16 at head office.

Industry:

Transport

Company size:

4,000+

Location:

United Kingdom

UP3 services:

ServiceNow Managed Service, ServiceNow Support Services

ServiceNow products:

ServiceNow CSM Pro Plus, ServiceNow ITSM Pro, Virtual Agent, Now Assist for CSM

Outcomes:

Case Summarisation implemented in just three weeks
Reduced time to resolve cases – saving an average of 13 seconds every time a chat is handed over to a human agent, saving approximately 130 minutes a week and 108 hours a year
Improved Agent productivity & capacity
Improved customer satisfaction
The scope extended to include Chat Summarisation and evaluating Chat Recommendation

The challenge

During a typical four-week period, the Customer Relations team receives between 40,000-100,000 customer contacts. Pre-pandemic 35% of all contacts came through digital channels, and it’s almost triple that now, with 90% of customers contacting Southeastern digitally wanting a rapid resolution.

Southeastern’s Customer Relations team already used ServiceNow as its CRM system to manage passenger queries and had recently had a massive improvement to customer service thanks to ServiceNow’s AI-powered Virtual Agent helping customers via online chat. Virtual Agent now handles around a third of Southeastern’s customer queries, with 80% of those resolved autonomously. Overall, each interaction with Virtual Agent is 825% more cost-effective than a phone call.

This freed up human Contact Centre Agents to focus on more complex problems, providing a better customer experience and greater job satisfaction. However, the volume, complexity, and variety of interactions that were routed to the Contact Centre Agents raised its own challenges.
Southeastern needed to help its Contact Centre Agents to quickly respond to and resolve these more complex customer queries. This was essential to ensuring that customers quickly received the high levels of support they expected and that Southeastern maintained and improved its high customer satisfaction scores.

“This is just the beginning of our Gen AI journey with ServiceNow and UP3. The ability to automatically summarise cases and chats increases productivity which means that Contact Centre Agents can focus on customer experience.”

David Banham, Customer Relations Operations Manager

The solution

As a UP3 ServiceNow Managed Service customer, Southeastern benefits from ongoing access to an expert team of ServiceNow practitioners who already understood Southeastern’s business challenges, transformation objectives and how they were currently working with the platform. UP3 identified that the quickest and most effective solution would be to take advantage of the AI capabilities of ServiceNow’s Now Assist for CSM.

UP3 worked with Southeastern to initially deploy Case Summarisation which uses AI to summarise chats into an easily digestible format for Southeastern’s Contact Centre Agents. It also provides a summary of customer records, including tickets and journeys.

Southeastern was so impressed with the ease and speed at which UP3 implemented Now Assist for CSM, and with the capabilities of Case Summarisation, that they broadened the initial scope. UP3 went on to implement Chat Summarisation and are already evaluating Chat Recommendation with a view to deploy it soon to further improve average handling time.

UP3 - Now Assist for CSM boosts customer experience at Southeastern

Southeastern could see the clear value in these capabilities, for both customers and Call Centre Agents, and made the decision to uplift its licensing to Service Now Pro+ so it had access to these features.

While this is just the first step in Southeastern’s AI journey, the ambition is clear. Now Assist capabilities will help save the Customer Relations team considerable amounts of time and speed up the service they provide. Most importantly, it delivers success for all concerned: a better experience for customers, higher job satisfaction for employees, and greater efficiency for Southeastern.

Customisation

Because Southeastern’s instance of ServiceNow was built on custom tables, it couldn’t rely on an out-of-the-box solution and needed a partner with strong customisation skills. There was no published use case of Now Assist being successfully configured against custom tables at the time. However, thanks to the collective power of UP3’s AI Centre of Excellence, the team configured a solution using the Now Assist Skill Kit.

The outcome

Thanks to UP3’s team of ServiceNow experts, the implementation of Now Assist for CSM was completed within just three weeks. Southeastern were able to quickly see the impact, as well as an instant return on their investment.

With the new GenAI features deployed, Southeastern’s Contact Centre Agents now receive a clear summary of each customer’s case and chat, as well as a recommended response for each query. This summary includes key actions the customer has taken, historical communications, and any related information to ensure the agents have a holistic view of the query to help provide the customer with a happy resolution.

Southeastern rapidly reaped three key benefits:

Reduced time to resolve cases – Quicker handling time on chat interactions that were diverted from the Virtual Agent to a live agent. Southeastern saw a reduction of 13 seconds average handling time when a chat was handed over to a live agent, thanks to Chat and Case Summarisation. This saves a total of 130 minutes per week, adding up to 108 hours in a year.

Improved Agent productivity & capacity – Less time is wasted on Contact Centre Agents getting up to speed on cases and reviewing interaction history, meaning they can address customer issues faster and focus on more value-add activities.

Improved customer satisfaction – Case and Chat Summarisation helps human agents get up to speed faster, enabling them to focus on delivering the best possible experience for customers, leading to improved customer satisfaction as they don’t have to repeat themselves and get a rapid resolution.

UP3’s deployment of Now Assist for Southeastern is only the first phase of an ongoing roadmap to use ServiceNow’s AI functionality to continuously improve the customer journey. It’s a shining example of how UP3’s ServiceNow Managed Service provides ongoing value to organisations seeking to stay at the forefront of digital transformation and customer satisfaction.

“Honestly, it’s been the easiest of implementations and we can already see the instant benefits, but more importantly we can see the future of developments this could lead to. Job well done to all involved.”

David Banham, Customer Relations Operations Manager

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Southeastern improves customer experience with Now Assist for CSM

About Southeastern

Outcomes:

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The challenge

The solution

Customisation

The outcome

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