National Rail Enquiries' Online Journey Planner has
helped the company to cope with a massive increase in the number of
calls duringthis week's bad weather (10 March).
The Online
Journey Planner system, which was launched in 2003, helped
relieve the pressure on the company's call centre, which had three
times the usual number of calls during the stormy weather that
wreaked havoc on the UK's rail system.
Chris Scoggins, chief executive at the company, said on a normal
Monday there would be 60,000 calls, but this week saw 180,000
would-be travellers picking up the phone. "Having the online system
allowed us to deal with this," Scoggins said.
The application was developed by Transeo and sits on servers in
two datacentres in case of disaster. "It is a highly resilient,
high-performance platform built to handle seamless transition in
the event of disaster," said Scoggins.
Passengers are increasingly visiting the site or using other
self-service options such as WAP and SMS instead of the call
centre. The online journey planner has so far been used 125 million
times in the most recent financial year ending this month. This is
up from 100 million last year. In comparison, the telephone
enquiries system had 20 million requests this year.
