NJ TRANSIT Boosts Response Capacity by 500 Percent, Streamlines Customer Service with Salesforce CRM Service

Challenge

  • To increase the productivity and effectiveness of its customer service operations, NJ TRANSIT, New Jersey's public transportation corporation, needed to replace its existing customer system.
  • As a company whose mission includes dedication to customer needs, it was important to capture all customer interactions and track the organization's operational responses.
  • A limited number of employees had access to the existing customer information system, which did not track all the required information.
  • The agency wanted to allow all employees responsible for Customer Service and Support to access the new solution and enable its riders to directly enter information.
  • Because NJ TRANSIT operates 24/7 and requires a 360-degree view of customer information, the organization narrowed its focus to always-available, low-maintenance cloud-computing solutions.

Solution

  • NJ TRANSIT selected Salesforce CRM Service because of its minimal IT requirements, powerful customization capabilities, and anytime, anywhere access.
  • The new system was rolled out to more than 150 customer service employees and, through Salesforce CRM Service email and linkage to the NJ TRANSIT Web site, to more than 3,000 potential employees and three-state ridership over a five-month period.
  • To address the complexities of supporting riders of thousands of buses, trains, and light rail vehicles, NJ TRANSIT tailored Salesforce CRM Service for each operation's needs.
  • Using Force.com's builder, the agency extended cases to track transit-specific details and then built new custom objects to manage operational responses and service quality investigations.
  • NJ TRANSIT gives customers and internal users the ability to ask questions and submit issues, which flow into the Salesforce CRM Service central customer information warehouse.
  • Integrations that use the Force.com API link Salesforce CRM Service to a data warehouse, employee information, an email management system, and a data quality solution.
  • The agency rolled out Force.com workflow capabilities in one week to streamline and improve the operations of its customer service staff; workflow rules route incoming customer questions to the appropriate subject area expert.
  • Salesforce.com Premier Support customer service from salesforce.com helps NJ TRANSIT ensure 24/7 uptime for its customer-service system.
  • NJ TRANSIT currently uses Force.com's sites for customers to make Group Trip reservations online.

 

Results

  • With Salesforce CRM Service, NJ TRANSIT delivers faster and more complete responses to constituents and adheres to performance standards and measures 24/7.
  • In 2006, NJ TRANSIT used Salesforce CRM Service to handle 42,323 customer inquiries—a 500 percent improvement over the 8,354 inquiries addressed in 2004—without an increase in staff; the average response time for customer inquiries dropped by more than 35 percent in the same period.
  • The agency now has 100 percent visibility into all submitted issues, as well as the resolution activities that were previously performed solely with emails and phone calls
  • With Force.com workflow, response times have decreased 36%.
  • The agency was recognized as a technology leader when it won a 2008 InfoWorld 100 award for its Force.com-based customer service platform.
  • Real-time dashboards track key operational metrics and support management priorities.
  • NJ TRANSIT is able to double the number of cases it handles with no additional staffing, thanks to the system's streamlined communication and enhanced issue-tracking capabilities.
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Full Case Study

NJ TRANSIT is the organization that oversees transit operations across the state of New Jersey. The overall system of bus, rail and light-rail routes carries over 250 million passengers a year, rolling over three billion passenger miles in 2006 and taking in $729 million in revenue.

NJ TRANSIT originally started using salesforce.com's support and service application in 2005. In the past two years, they have expanded their use of the Force.com platform to address a variety of issues revolving around customer satisfaction. The story of how NJ TRANSIT has used the Force.com platform to vastly improve their ability to fulfill their business mission illustrates the power of the platform.

Expanding Service and Support

Like many customers, NJ TRANSIT began using the Force.com platform to expand their internal support capabilities. The organization’s customer service representatives use the salesforce.com service and support application to handle their cases.

Initially, NJ TRANSIT began to expand the reach of the core application. NJ TRANSIT implemented a direct interface from its Web site, so that when a customer files a report it is automatically turned into a support case in Salesforce CRM.

NJ TRANSIT also started to use the Force.com platform for other applications. The agency created a system where their undercover agents could report on the results of their investigations in the field, as well as a correspondence management system for their executives, which would eliminate the confusion and waste caused by multiple executives responding to the same customer complaint.

Enter Workflow

NJ TRANSIT’s use of the Force.com platform began to change with the introduction of workflow capabilities in the Winter ’07 release. Although Tim Wierzbicki, the manager of the NJ TRANSIT customer service performance analysis & support and Salesforce CRM administrator, is not an IT person, he realized that he could use workflow to streamline and improve the operations of the customer satisfaction staff.

Prior to the use of Force.com workflow, the customer satisfaction staff had all been generalists. Every staffer was responsible for dealing with every type of issue, and every staffer had to reach out separately to the appropriate internal departments for information and issue resolution. Because this matrix organization added a lot of inefficiency to the overall process, Wierzbicki was tasked by Dennis Martin, senior director of customer service, and Anthony Grieco, director of customer response, to design an application to correct the problem.

Wierzbicki, Martin, and Grieco decided to make each member of the staff the expert for a customer service area, calling them “customer relations specialists." This new alignment was supported by a set of business rules that would route incoming customer inquiries to the appropriate subject area expert. That expert would be the only person interacting with their support staff, which would not only decrease the communications overhead, but also build the staffer into a center of expertise, allowing them to do their job more efficiently.

It took about a week to design and implement the workflow rules, which were rolled out over Super Bowl weekend in early 2007.

Force.com Powers Results

The results exceeded management’s expectations. In 2004, the support staff was able to handle 8,354 inquiries in the year. In 2006, the same staff was able to handle 42,323 inquiries – an improvement of more than 500 percent. Even with the increased volume, the average time to respond to customer inquiries dropped by more than 35 percent in the same period.

NJ TRANSIT was able to see the possibilities presented by the Force.com platform, use the platform to re-organize internal staff, and significantly advance the business mission – with less than a week of work, without the help of a developer. As Tim put it, “Force.com workflow made us completely change how we did business” – for the better.

Business Improvements Through Force.com

NJ TRANSIT has also used applications from AppExchange to extend their platform even further. With an application from Pervasive, NJ Transit associates complaints and commendations with individual employees. With this information, NJ TRANSIT can track how the performance of their employees, identifying their outstanding contributors for recognition and rewards, as well as those individuals who may need further training to improve their skills. NJ TRANSIT can even evaluate the effectiveness of training by comparing feedback on an employee before and after a training session.

In an effort to further improve their customer service, NJ TRANSIT uses the Click Tools application from AppExchange to create customer satisfaction surveys. Since this application runs on the Force.com platform, the results can be directly tied back into other service metrics, helping NJ TRANSIT to understand the effectiveness of their employees’ work on customer complaints.

The Future

The results delivered by the Force.com platform have made NJ TRANSIT a believer in the Force.com platform. The agency is continually thinking of new ways to improve and streamline all the processes.

In speaking of the platform, Wierzbicki paraphrases one of salesforce.com's slogans: “I feel like we are only limited by our imagination.”

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