Southeastern’s Digital Transformation with ServiceNow

The challenge

Southeastern faced mounting pressures as customer expectations rapidly evolved and outdated systems combined with manual processes made it difficult to keep up. During peak times, these inefficiencies threatened service quality and forced the company to hire temporary staff to meet regulatory response times.

Key challenges

• Growing customer preference for digital channels and self-service
• Legacy manual processes for every claim and contact
• Two separate CRM systems creating complexity and slowing down work
• Backlogs threatening customer experience and increasing costs

The solution

ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM)

UP3 recommended consolidating all customer engagement into ServiceNow, a single unified platform. This would provide one system of action for effective management of every customer interaction, the ability to automate workflows, and enhance staff efficiency.

Today, ServiceNow sits at the heart of Southeastern’s Customer Relations operations, supported by UP3 and their unique ServiceNow Managed Service. Through this long-term partnership, Southeastern has access to a team of ServiceNow experts for ongoing strategic guidance ensuring they take advantage of the ever-evolving ServiceNow platform to reduce manual work, improve staff productivity, enhance customer experience, and keep costs down.

Since implementing ServiceNow CSM, UP3 and Southeastern have: Automated the Delay Repay process: Built on ServiceNow, UP3 built a rail specific app to automate Southeastern’s Delay Repay process. The app automates up to 70% of compensation claims, identifying fraud, saving significant time and ensuring compliance with strict industry regulations.

Increased deflections through ServiceNow Virtual Agent: As digital interactions nearly doubled (from 35% in 2019 to 63% in 2023), UP3 implemented ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent as Southeastern’s webchat tool. This now resolves 75% of webchat customer queries without any human input, freeing agents up for complex cases.

Improved case resolution times through Now Assist for CSM: UP3 deployed Now Assist for CSM, implementing Case Summarisation and Chat Summarisation to provide agents with a snapshot of cases and chats, getting them up to speed quickly, reducing case resolution times and improving customer service.

Cut manual work through custom AI Agents: Through UP3’s AI Unlocked Service Offering, Southeastern and UP3 identified a range of highly manual processes across the wider Customer Relations team, ideal for automation through ServiceNow AI Agents. The first agent, Major Incident Report Generator, was built in just 3 weeks and successfully reduced report creation time from 96 hours to just 4 minutes.

A single, unified CRM platform providing an end-to-end view of each customer contact with Southeastern