SNCF carries more than 3 million passengers in France every day. To adapt to the digital habits of its customers, the company is present on the channels they use daily, such as messaging. By leveraging RingCentral Engage Digital, SNCF unifies the management of all its digital channels to provide instant answers to passengers.
Watch the video to discover the testimonials of the SNCF team:
- Michaël Fleurbaey – Head of Social Media of SNCF Group
- Subashree Sougoumar – Head of Traffic Info Center and Customer Contact of Voyages SNCF
- Anne-Virginie Morel – Head of Customer Service Remote Center of the SNCF Group
The SNCF group: more than 3 million daily passengers
SNCF is a public company created in 1937. The group offers a complete range of mobility solutions through its six-core businesses and achieves 33.3 Billion euros in turnover, of which 33% is generated abroad.
Every day the group circulates more than 15,000 trains and carries more than 3 million passengers. It is also the most publicized company in France, with over 5,000 mentions per day on social media.
The company’s mission is to bring freedom of effortless mobility and a greener planet to all. In the coming years, the group’s challenge is to combine all mobility solutions through its networks and partnerships.
SNCF’s Customer Care Approach
SNCF’s main objective for customer care is to be present where travelers are to answer their questions: at the train station, by phone, on the website, within the mobile application and on digital channels they already use to communicate with their peers.
Digital is becoming more and more important in conversations with travelers. Since August 2019, more than 50% of train ticket purchases are made online via Oui.SNCF. This trend can also be observed in customer interactions: in 2019, the group saw 30% of additional contacts via digital channels. These channels allow customers to easily contact SNCF, especially from their smartphone while on the move.
SNCF relies on RingCentral Engage Digital to manage its digital customer relationship. The solution allows the company to unify the management of messaging channels (Facebook Messenger, In-App Messaging in the TGV Pro application) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter). Thus, agents use a single interface to process all digital interactions and access a unified history of conversations.
Customer Service of @SNCF: 30% increase in interactions via #Messaging and #SocialMedia this year Click To Tweet
Challenges of responsiveness and transparency
The SNCF customer service is available 7 days a week, from 7am to 10pm. Its main challenges are responsiveness, transparency, and accuracy of information.
To respond to customers on digital channels, three teams use the solution RingCentral Engage Digital:
- The Traffic Info Center at Gare de l’Est in Paris: located within the National Center for Railway Operations, the Traffic Info Center has two primary missions :
- Updating real-time traffic information on the SNCF website and the application
- Answering traffic info questions from travelers on digital channels
- Customer Service Remote Centers in Vannes and Nantes: these teams are dedicated to the commercial relationship: purchase of tickets, loyalty programs, questions on services, after-sales. It is also the teams that respond to TGV Pro customers who contact SNCF directly in the application thanks to Messaging In-App.
- The Social Room at the SNCF campus in Paris: this team handles the community management with three main areas:
- Community management: communication on the partnerships of the group (culture, sport …), on the services in the station and the trains, sending personalized answers with graphic creations
- Monitoring digital channels to find out what customers say about SNCF
- Answering to persons categorized as influencers
These teams can respond on all digital channels of the SNCF group related to different entities such as Ouigo, TGV Inoui, TER, Transilien, Intercités …
Thanks to the routing engine of Engage Digital, messages are transferred to the right team according to the nature of the request. When necessary, the conversation can also be transferred between the different teams in a transparent way for the customer: the latter stays on the same communication channel, and the conversation history is kept. Interactions can be redirected so that the customer gets the right answer as quickly as possible, without having to switch from one channel to another.
These features help SNCF to provide quick answers to customers, even in real-time, when it comes to traffic info questions. The company responds in less than 1 hour on messaging channels and social media.
A statistics monitoring to adapt the activity in real-time
One of the advantages mentioned by the SNCF teams is the monitoring of the activity of the digital channels. With the dashboard, teams can track key metrics in real-time across all channels.
This dashboard enables the SNCF to significant key indicators such as average response time, handling time, and message volumes on each channel. Supervisors can adjust resources in real-time to adapt to activity peaks.
These indicators can also be tracked at an individual level, allowing supervisors to track the performance of their team and help them improve their skills.
SNCF has been working for more than 10 years with RingCentral. Using Engage Digital to support the company’s solution to adapt to changes in the customer relationship: after the forum SNCF, Twitter and Facebook were adopted, then messaging.
The group is currently deploying their chatbot on the @SNCF Twitter account to answer common questions from travelers, and redirect them to an agent when necessary.
Originally published Nov 15, 2019, updated Apr 18, 2021
