State of New Jersey (New Jersey Transit Authority)

Project: Customer Relationship Management

NJ Transit is the nation's largest statewide public transportation system providing bus, rail, and light rail services of over 900,000 daily trips on 247 bus routes, 26 bus stations, 11 commuter rail lines, and three light rail lines. NJ Transit links major points in New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia, serving 164 rail stations, 60 light rail stations and 19,800 bus stops. NJ Transit relies upon its ability to field and respond to customer feedback, and requires a robust customer service system. The agency transformed its customer feedback process from one where issues went unresolved, with no tracking and, in some cases, with multiple executives seeing and responding to the same inquiry to a streamlined, faster, more accurate, and more efficient response system. The legacy infrastructure for tracking customer information and inquiries had limited functionality and not all customer inquiries were properly documented for future use. In addition, customer service representatives were responsible for a wide variety of inquiries, limiting the depth of knowledge they could apply to any given inquiry.

When NJ Transit began the search for a new customer system, the organization found that a hosted CRM system from Salesforce.com service fit its needs. To take full advantage of the software’s capabilities, NJT realigned its customer service department to make each member of the staff the expert for a specific customer service area, which decreased communications overhead and improved productivity. The cloud-based system provides workflow rules that route incoming customer questions to the subject area experts. It also enabled customers and internal users the ability to ask questions and submit issues on the existing site via an online “Contact Us” web form, which flows into the solution’s central customer information warehouse. The system’s applications are linked to a data warehouse, employee information, an e-mail management system, and a data quality system.

Under the new system, the same number of staff handled 42,323 inquiries in 2006, compared with 8,354 in 2004. During its use, and without an increase in staff, the average response time to inquiries dropped by more than 35 percent and productivity increased by 31 percent. The web form cut down on the time spent handling free-form e-mail; approximately 50 percent of all customer feedback is captured via the online form. Salesforce has allowed NJ Transit to make significant improvements in their customer service capabilities while simultaneously reducing cost, infrastructure, and response time.