Canadian National's Winnipeg call center satisfies customers

Canadian National's call center is an example of the technology and solutions provided by telemarketing in Manitoba. Canadian National is Canada's largest and North America's sixth-largest railway based on 1996 revenues of $4.2 billion. It serves all of Canada's major economic centers, natural resource regions and ports, and has strategic connections with all major U.S. railways. Its Customer Support Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba was created to offer better customer service by providing a single point of contact for all its customers throughout North America. Each of CN's top 800 customers (some 97 percent of CN's total revenues) are assigned to a customer support unit (CSU) based on their dominant business with CN. The customer service units are aligned along product lines and, where it makes sense, geographically divided.

Within the CSU, each customer is assigned a "preferred" customer service representative (CSR) as well as a marketing account manager. A CSR may be responsible for up to 40 accounts.

A suite of technologies called Customer Service Interfaces (CSI) has been designed to enhance productivity and to support the transformation of the CSR from information provider to problem solver.

By utilizing dedicated 800 numbers and advanced computer-telephony integration, each incoming call is automatically routed, along with a customer contact profile, to the appropriate customer service representative. Before the customer-CSR dialog begins, the caller profile identifies to the CSR which customer is calling, what that person generally calls about, his or her location and any particulars such as track or plant layout.

Based on the profile, the CSR can quickly call up a number of different databases from different systems, which enables the CSR to respond knowledgeably to any customer inquiry. This integration is especially helpful to new CSRs as all information is available to them on easy-to-read and use screens. A copy of what the CSR has on the screen is available at any time to the customer via an integrated fax server function and is automatically formatted to the customer's preference as outlined in the caller profile.

If a customer wishes to be transferred to another agent, the system handles the joint phone and data transfer, thus eliminating the need to "retell the story" to the new agent. By tracking customers' calling practices, automatic fax reports can be issued before the customer asks. These reports are also stored for display, should a customer call and want to discuss anything contained in the report. This way both the customer and the CSR are "reading from the same page."

Should a customer perform a function that needs to be updated in any of CN's operating systems, such as a car release, the CSI system will automatically generate the update and only notify the CSR should the update fail. This allows the CSR to be more productive by handling more calls. The intent is to handle each call once, leaving a satisfied customer as the result.

Robert W. Dods is a business systems officer with CN's Information Technology department and is based in the Customer Support Center in Winnipeg. Canadian National operates approximately 17,000 route miles of track across Canada and about 950 route miles of track in the United States. The network serves all five of Canada's major ports: Halifax, Montreal, Prince Rupert, Thunder Bay and Vancouver.

Copyright Technology Marketing Corporation May 1997
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