Northern Trains builds stronger relationships with 1M+ passengers

Rail company halves the time to productivity and drives revenue growth with AI and automation.

Customers increasingly want to engage on digital channels. But how do you achieve this when the majority of your services are firmly fixed in the physical world? Northern Trains, a subsidiary of the Department for Transport’s public sector owning group, DOHL (DfT OLR Holdings Limited), has found the answer. Thanks to AI, Data, and CRM, Northern is discovering new ways to blend digital and physical experiences – from requesting assistance to sharing service updates with millions of passengers.

“We want to have a lasting positive impact on the North,” said Mark Powles, Commercial and Customer Director for Northern. “By getting closer to our customers and optimising our operations, we can make rail travel a better experience for everyone.”

It’s not just customers that will benefit from the transformation, it will also help the rail company’s employees work faster and smarter. Northern has already:

• Saved 50% of the time taken to complete some common customer service tasks with automated workflows.
• Freed up 4,000 hours a year by simplifying the analysis of rail travel metrics.
• Unified over 1.2 million customer records on a single secure cloud platform, which will provide teams with richer insights. 

Let’s take a deeper look at how Northern uses Einstein 1 to accelerate its customer experience and efficiency goals.

1. Drive growth by cutting complexity and boosting efficiency.

2. Reduce escalation times for customer service cases by 60% with greater automation and integration.

3. Empower agents to resolve 99% of online queries first time with 360-degree visibility.

4. Unlock richer insights from over 1.2 million customer records with real-time updates.

5. Build stronger customer connections with personalised communications.

Complexity is one of the biggest barriers to efficiency. And the rail industry in Great Britain is incredibly complex. As one of the country’s 28 train operating companies, Northern must collaborate with dozens of partners to ensure it can provide 2,5000+ services a day to more than 500 destinations across the North of England.

“The rail industry is very fragmented: there are 80+ datasets and systems that link to the customer experience alone,” said Tracy Barr, Head of Customer Experience for Northern. “Our customers want reliable and friendly train services that make their lives easier.”

Northern, which has around 7,000 employees, is tackling this industry fragmentation head on with Einstein 1. From the station platform to the customer experience centre, the rail company uses AI, Data, and CRM to optimise workflows, simplify interactions, and empower teams.

Controlling costs and driving growth are key priorities for Northern, which is still recovering from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on train travel. “We want customers to trust us more and travel with us more – we already connect tens of thousands of people with work, leisure, and education every day,” said Powles. “With Salesforce, we can keep enriching their experiences and our services.”

Customers expect seamless and effortless service on every channel. For Northern that poses a massive challenge. As well as answering customer calls and emails, it needs to provide a prompt response across a range of physical touchpoints – from platform lifts to ticket machines.

To ensure it can meet passenger expectations, Northern has introduced a new customer service platform to help improve the efficiency of its Customer Experience Centre. For example, it has used automated workflows in Service Cloud to reduce the time taken to escalate a case to an external partner from approximately four minutes to less than 90 seconds, which equates to a reduction of around 60%. Northern has also halved the time it takes to log some passenger compensation requests by eliminating the need for agents to manually input information from emails. And there are still more efficiency gains to come.

By integrating its customer service solution with a national railway information system, Northern will be able to automatically add unique train service codes to customer inquiries when needed. This will save an agent around two minutes per case. Northern estimates these and other improvements will help to free up around four full-time equivalent agents, enabling them to take on additional customer channels.

Northern’s team of 50+ agents handle around 500,000 inquiries a year – many of which are currently telephone-based. To provide a faster response for a lower cost, Northern wants to make greater use of digital channels. It has already deployed live chat and Einstein Agent chatbots to provide automated answers to common customer requests.

Northern  is already receiving almost a third of customer contacts via digital self-service and expects this to increase to over 60%. The rail company is also looking at using Einstein 1 Service to help empower agents with new features, such as next best action recommendations and knowledge article for individual cases.

*to an external partner.

Customers don’t just want a fast response; they want a personal response. And that means teams need visibility of more than just individual support cases. Northern uses Service Cloud to provide agents with a 360-degree view of customers – from ticket purchases and frequent journeys to marketing promotions and service interactions.

“We can now understand – and recognise - customer value and loyalty,” said John Smith, Customer Operations Manager for Northern. For example, when a passenger contacts Northern, an agent can see if they are a season ticket holder and offer a resolution that reflects their relationship.

Capturing and sharing the right information at the right time is essential for empowering agents. Northern has introduced new dynamic web forms that mean agents no longer have to ask customers for follow-up information. This means 99% of cases logged from this channel can be resolved first time.

The new customer service tools have already simplified agent onboarding, with training taking days instead of weeks. The Customer Experience team leaders can use the tools to track how agents are performing and identify skills gaps and efficiency improvements more easily. Centralised customer services records also make it easier for Northern to unlock accurate insights into case volumes, engagement trends, and resource requirements.

Encouraging customers to engage on digital channels makes it easier for you to get to know them better. Around 90% of Northern’s customers are currently anonymous – and it wants to use Salesforce to change this. It has migrated 1.2 million customer records to Data Cloud, which makes updates in real time. For example, every ticket purchased via a Northern digital channel is captured on the platform. “When you bridge the gap between fragmented datasets, that’s when the magic happens. We can now share the right customer information at the right time with the right team,” said Keith White, Head of Digital Experience for Northern.

It took Northern just five months to implement Data Cloud with help from Salesforce Professional Services. It was a challenging project: Northern needed to deploy a new platform and build a new data model at the same time.

To ensure it makes the most of its passenger data, Northern uses Tableau Analytics. It has created a series of dashboards that will help it better understand its current customers and attract new ones. For example, one dashboard shows the lifetime value of individual customers, which helps Northern target profitable growth and passenger satisfaction.

The rail company also uses the AI-powered analytics platform to unlock richer operational and commercial insights. Northern can now aggregate and visualise data from the Rail Availability and Revenue Service in a single place instead of using multiple spreadsheets, which has helped to save more than 4,000 hours a year. With better visibility of passenger numbers and journeys across the network, Northern can make more informed decisions about changes to ticket fares and train services.

Richer customer data opens up new opportunities for personalisation – from marketing promotions to service updates. Northern has already used Marketing Cloud to deliver successful campaigns based on a passenger’s travel history.

Northern’s new customer data platform is key to its personalisation ambitions. It has helped the rail company create one of the industry’s largest consented customer databases in Great Britain and develop detailed personas that reflect different passengers’ needs and journeys. For example, Northern now knows that students make up around 10% of its customer database and that value for money is a key motivator.

“We can segment passengers more easily and target communications more effectively,” said Claire Rowland, Head of Sales and Marketing for Northern. Now, if a station needs to be closed for maintenance, the rail company can look at historical ticket purchases to identify impacted customers.

Northern also uses automated journeys to send personalised emails at key moments in the customer relationship, such as season ticket renewals. As personalisation gains momentum, the marketing team will be able to use Marketing Cloud to measure campaign ROI and prioritise future investments.

Northern also uses Sales Cloud to enrich relationships with its B2B customers, which include companies that purchase large volumes of season tickets for their employees.