£1.3m/€1.5m annual compensation savings for major European operator

Go-Ahead, a multinational operator working across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region approached Tracsis for a solution that to improve their processing of Delay Repay – a UK scheme to refund passengers for delayed travel. Go-Ahead needed to significantly reduce the cost of processing claims, reduce time from claim submission to award, and flag fraudulent claims more effectively.

Tracsis' Passenger Compensation capability was ideally placed to solve these challenges. The service combines industry data sources including real-time train data, ticket sales information and smart card tap data to generate a comprehensive understanding of possible travel across the day. Customers submit their claims through a streamlined customer portal that requires minimal data entry. Alternatively, customers may choose to have their claims automatically calculated from smartcard tap data. All claims are verified for ticket and journey validity, and fraud detection checks are also applied automatically. Successful claims are paid via a wide selection of payment options and customers are notified throughout the process. The majority of valid claims are awarded automatically with no human intervention, saving both processing costs and improving customer response times.

• Processing costs have been more than halved since the adoption of Tracsis' Passenger Compensation, saving an estimated £1.3m per annum

• During severe disruption, the system has been proven to cope with more than 25,000 claims per day which, prior to Tracsis' solution, would have quickly overwhelmed the claim processing staff

• Tracsis' Passenger Compensation processes over 80% of all claims in an automated way

• The majority of claims processed through Passenger Compensation are completed within three days of receipt

Challenges

Processing a Delay Repay claim is a difficult task to perform manually. Each journey leg must be looked up to see how the trains actually ran on the day, making it a slow process for an Agent to perform (and at each interchange the number of possible journey options that the customer could take multiplies almost exponentially).

Next the Agent must look at the ticket evidence and decide if the ticket appears to be correct. This is purely a visual inspection as there is no easy way for this data to be looked up manually. After this, they must work out if the ticket can be used for travel on the journey submitted by the customer which is extremely time consuming if done properly.

Typically, Agents are asked to work at speed, so the time needed to assess a claim accurately is not available. This leaves the agent with a choice of guessing the claim outcome or processing a claim very slowly. The client needed both: increased claim processing speed to decrease costs, while still getting highly accurate assessments.

How Tracsis helped

Our Passenger Compensation capability automates most of the work associated with claims from submission through to fulfilment, including the two most laborious tasks for agents: delay calculation and ticket verification.

Passenger Compensation automatically assesses the delay accurately by using multiple sources of industry data to get the best view of how the trains ran on the day and modelling customer behaviour against the available journey options.

Our solution then checks the ticket against multiple sources of ticket data to ensure the ticket is genuine, whether it is owned by the customer and also that it is valid for the journey claimed.

All calculation steps are made available to agents during and after any referral process, reducing much of the work during assessment as well as enabling simpler auditing.

Results, ROI, and future direction

The adoption of Tracsis' Passenger Compensation significantly improved processing times through automating claims and also reduced manual handling times when a claim is handled by an agent. Consequently, most claims are now processed in less than three days. With such levels of automation it has also allowed the contact centre to cope with larger volumes of claims during periods of disruption – with peaks of 25,000 claims in a day. The client’s original aim of reducing costs has been realised through the deployment of Passenger Compensation – cutting their costs of claim processing by an estimated £1.3m per year.

As newer, smarter ticket types become available within the industry, the future for Passenger Compensation can only become smarter and more connected, with increased levels of efficiency and advanced fraud detection.

Alongside Tracsis' other innovations across Ticketing, Operation, Safety and Assets, this project demonstrates our results-backed commitment to modernising transport and improving outcomes for operators and passengers globally.