When you integrate digital technology into new areas of your business and it dramatically improves how your business operates, and (perhaps more importantly) helps your customers, you have digitally transformed. A great example of how this can deliver business value (and make things safer) can be seen by looking no further than at the UK’s railway network. The vast majority of the railway network and infrastructure in England, Wales and Scotland is owned and managed by Network Rail. It is responsible for the maintenance of assets such as bridges, tracks, lights, and tunnels, ensuring the safe operation of the UK’s rail transport system to millions of users daily.
They wanted to offload their live customer agents from having to answer often asked questions (such as ‘are there station facilities at Paddington’), freeing them to handle more complex inquiries. Thus, they sought to implement a chatbot and turned a leading System Integrator of the Oracle Digital Assistant, BoxFusion. Once they showed them how easy it was to implement the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of a FAQ bot, BoxFusion worked with Network Rail to deliver an ODA Skill that helps construction and maintenance worker find and answer questions permit forms (‘how do I fill out a permit to work on the water main’.)
For end-users, the chatbot can handle questions such as ‘I left my bag at Waterloo… who should I call?’? Given there are a number of 3rd parties involved in baggage retrieval and delivery, the bot knows the correct party to route them to.
There is also an impressive emergency/disaster ODA Skills that has been set up with hot words such as 'crash' or ‘bridge strike'; if these words occur during a chat conversation, an overlay in the UI immediately pop-ups with the emergency phone number if needed, and a Google Maps widget is overlayed with rail lines drawn so the user can drop a pin to report the precise location (see image.)
We’ll be discussing with BoxFusion these, and other Digital Transformation use cases in a webinar soon, so stay tuned for those details…
