SJ turns to IBM to improve mobile, online customer experience, increase sales

IBM today announced that SJ®, Sweden’s largest rail operator, is turning to customer experience management software from IBM to improve its mobile and online booking process and overall online customer experience to increase ticket sales.

IBM’s Tealeaf customer experience management (CEM) solutions are helping SJ to understand, identify, and eliminate consumer pain points on online and mobile channels. Technologies and services designed to help businesses keep pace with the rapidly shifting preferences of today’s increasingly digital consumers are part of IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, SJ transports more than 100,000 passengers every day, with more than 50 percent of passenger bookings completed online. However, during an initial investigation, SJ discovered that more than 230,000 customers annually were experiencing difficulties when booking online travel with a credit card, which ultimately impacted ticket sales.

As railway deregulation began in Sweden, SJ realized it would begin to face increased competition from private rail operators. In addition, with the influx of budget airlines that offer low cost fares at the same price point as train tickets, SJ wanted to find a way to improve the online customer experience and eliminate customer service issues.

A pilot project with IBM’s customer experience software revealed that customers struggled with several aspects of the booking process, including booking multi-stop journeys, reserving seats and making payments using a mobile device. A certain group of customers who had valid credit card payments were inadvertently declined during the booking process due to overly stringent criteria set by SJ’s fraud team. IBM’s technology also provided SJ with the ability to record and replay individual customer sessions, without revealing sensitive information such as complete credit card numbers. This has improved SJ’s ability to serve their customers and respond to online disputes.

“As the largest train operator in Sweden, we understand how important it is for our growing digital customer base to easily book and purchase journeys through our website without issue” said Thomas Mann, Head of Distribution, SJ. “Together with IBM, we realized our digital technology investments were not optimally supporting our customer experience. To improve the online experience, our key ecommerce departments now monitor critical business processes around ticket sales, improving our ability to immediately resolve customer problems. We expect this to result in an increase in customer ticket sales.”

“SJ understands the importance of putting their customers first” said Geoff Galat, Vice President Marketing, IBM Tealeaf. “The online customer experience can make or break a sale and customers have little patience with websites that fail to meet their immediate expectations. By identifying and remedying issues with their online booking process, SJ will streamline the reservation process and better meet the demands of their increasingly digital customers.”

IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative features software and services that help companies transform their business processes to more quickly respond to shifting customer demands in today’s digitally-transformed marketplace. The initiative is driven by CMOs and other C-suite executives who are increasingly looking for ways to bring new levels of automation to marketing, sales and fulfillment to secure greater customer loyalty and improve the customer experience.

Current IBM software and services being used by SJ includes IBM Tealeaf CX, IBM Tealeaf cxImpact, and IBM Tealeaf cxView.

More information on IBM Tealeaf Solutions can be found at http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/category/SWX70