John Melville

Said the following about Virgin Trains Back on Track Project:

“Introduction

Virgin Trains game changing App, Back on Track helps connect operational control and frontline teams with data and up-to-the-minute information on service disruption.

The project, part of a business fundamental has seen a positive introduction, reducing calls to operational control allowing our teams to make more informed decisions in our customer’s interests. As part of a wider package of works contributed to a +11% increase in NRPS satisfaction for Dealing with Delays and aims to reduce the time take to recover the service and therefore inconvenience fewer customers.

Background

Disruption is our biggest industry challenge, which has never been solved. Aging systems and processes that are no longer fit for purpose and soloed. Too much time is spent re-keying data in systems leading to disparate version of the truth which can leave both our frontline teams and customers uninformed. Our root-cause problem is simple. Over 1,000 colleagues, trying to communicate with each other and circa 100,000 customers each day, trying to give and receive consistent information and direction, with conflicting information coming from many different sources.

Customer satisfaction during times of disruption falls significantly and we know providing customer information is the biggest driver of satisfaction during disruption. Managing an incident is about communication. Improving this is key to increasing customer satisfaction, improving team morale, accelerating service recovery and raising our negative industry perception.

What is it?

Its ground breaking software to improve how we communicate in disruption, built bespoke for Virgin Trains on the innovative Service Now platform to solve the issues raised by frontline teams.

The system enables Virgin Trains to deal with disruption and connect key players to solve the incident and get us Back on Track quicker, impacting fewer customers and colleagues. Back on Track connects up what has happened, where it has happened and who is involved by sharing the response and recovery plans. This allows those directly involved in an incident to receive personalised communications which are shared across the platform for all to see. All frontline Virgin Trains people will be able to access this information via an App and importantly feedback information from the ground to help improve the response and recovery plans.

Tasks and milestones are tracked which enable a more consistent response to incidents alongside better prediction of service recovery based upon real world data.

Both operational control and resources have a dashboard to manage the incident, showing recovery progress as tasks are completed. This means they can and allocate both trains and people to services in a more organised & efficient way, again helping speed up service recovery.

The Solution Objectives

- Reduce the Impact:

- Reduce the Disruption time & Customer Impact

- Reduce the impact on our people

- Delight our Customers:

- Keep Customers Informed via all channels

- More visible staff (not tied up on phones/offices)

- More consistent information, Single version of the truth, delivered in real time

- Support our People:

- Single Version of the Truth

- Real time visibility of a consistently delivered plan and individual’s role in delivering it

- Centrally coordinated control of information with decisions taking in the interest of customers

Challenges Overcome

Delivering Back on Track has been challenging. Disruption is multifaceted, means different things to different people and has different impacts across Virgin Trains – encompassing safety, operations, customer experience, commercial and technology.

This required a different approach from the use of legacy system, ensuring the information ecosystem was understood as well as process mapping our current processes.

Working with a technology provider outside of rail ensured that the project team were challenged to think outside of normal railway constraints. A clear stakeholder engagement plan meant that those impacted were listened to, ideas sought and feedback given throughout an agile delivery plan.

Our frontline teams were engaged throughout from concept stage through to having full time seconded Project Engagers join the project team to keep frontline teams up to date with developments as one of the main beneficiaries of the system. One example of this, uncovered as part of the discovery phase was a side benefit for individuals of showing traincrew diagrams digitally on the mobile device, as well as the personalised working for the day which could ultimately replace archaic physically published rosters.

The technology platform powering Back on Track was delivered in parallel with an equivalent customer facing platform called Track n Travel. The purpose of this was to ensure that the information being shown to colleagues was replicated in an easily digestible and accessible way for our customers, ensuring a consistent single source of the truth. This required close coordination of teams and shared objectives and delivery plans to ensure both hit challenging deadlines. This was delivered successfully by ensuring good interactive governance across the two work streams, ensuring clear and accountable stakeholders, clear reporting lines and a single joint steering group.

A particular challenges was for our operational teams, who have been given separate disparate systems over the years. We addressed this by ensuring the project team actively listened to their concerns to learn what would enable them to better deliver the customer timetable. A series of workshops were held with the resources and operational control teams to understand their requirements, map current processes and identify where improvements could be made to ensure the system was adopted and used. The continuous feedback and updates to the teams have ensured that the feedback flowed and enhancements and tweaks made in line with the possibilities the platform offered.

Results

Back on Track is one project within a wider Virgin Trains objective of ‘brilliant disruption’.

Internal user satisfaction with the product is high based on user feedback and engagement with the process.

Initial impact from introduction in terms of calls answered and ability to get through to control are encouraging as is Virgin Trains prime measure of customer satisfaction, net advocacy which is showing upwards trends for customers identified as being disrupted (those over 10 minutes), seeing improvements of up to 10 points.

As an indication of the potential benefit to operators there is keen industry interest. We are looking to partner with Network Rail, North West and Central route for some controlled trials for both operational control and frontline staff at managed stations to fully understand the user cases and applications outside of Virgin Trains, for the wider benefit of the industry and customers.“