Fast, simple and secure online ticket purchasing

The demand for online purchasing of rail tickets is growing at a phenomenal rate, representing a major opportunity for rail businesses to get closer to their customers, cut their ticket servicing costs and drive up revenue and repeat business through new products and targeted promotions.

AVANTIX™ WebTIS, the Atos online ticket purchasing solution delivers all these benefits to Southern, whilst also delivering more freedom of ticket choice and best-value pricing to rail passengers. Our effective and scalable solution not only supports and encourages the channel shift to online retailing, it also provides the right technology platform and hosting service to meet future demand.

• Until recently, Southern had outsourced its online retailing to a third-party provider who held all the passenger information gathered in the process of selling rail tickets. Without this information there was no opportunity for Southern to accumulate knowledge about their passengers. And without that, there was no opportunity for a closer and more direct marketing relationship, based on giving customers focused offers that fit in to their travel patterns and preferred pricing. This lack of direct customer relationships was denying Southern both the ability to take full advantage of the exponential growth in online rail retailing and the chance to improve customer satisfaction.

Solution 

• Atos was commissioned to deliver an online ticket purchasing and customer relationship
  management (CRM) solution to put complete control of passenger information back into the hands of Southern.
• Our solution has three components – the AVANTIX™ WebTIS web retailing technology platform, a hosting and disaster recovery service, and a commission-free per-transaction pricing model.
• The AVANTIX™ WebTIS system provides a standard platform offering full ticket transaction services online. The system design, build, maintenance, card authorisation, payment and 24/7 support are all part of the service. Yet all of that is only one part of the solution.
• Southern also has complete ownership of all the passenger data gathered and the ability to create or change targeted ticket offers and promotions, and put them online in a matter of minutes – quite literally. And while the AVANTIX™ WebTIS platform is standard, Southern has the capability to brand their site exactly how they want to. Once a customer has registered and submitted their email address a combination of CRM data capture and analysis, and fast customisation provide the focus for marketing campaigns.

Benefits

Passenger benefits

• For rail travellers the service provides a wide variety of benefits delivered through our unique ‘mixing deck’ interface. Travellers can look for tickets by train times or fare, or by using the ‘lowest fare finder’. Information they are given on-screen is available in real-time. That means the ticket they decide upon is far more likely to still be available when they come to complete their online transaction. In addition tickets are available for the whole of the UK’s national rail network.

Business benefits

• There are substantial business benefits derived directly from the CRM and online transactional capability, as well as from the way we provide our service. By offering a pay-per-transaction utility pricing model we eliminate the need for capital outlay and deliver far more of a ticket’s value back to the rail businesses. We further reduce cost by providing shared services hosting in one of our state-of-the art data centres, with availability in excess of 99.99%, backed up by disaster recovery from a second data centre. In fact, the whole solution drives down costs and is demonstrably cheaper to run than a call-centre outsourcing and commission-based operation

Download Full Case Study