Customer Success
Greyhound Lines, Inc. | Print |
ImagePlanning to compete in the travel business? Be prepared for a few ups and downs. Travel by nature is a cyclical business. Americans hit the road most often during the traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and the summer vacation months, so successful travel firms have adapted their operations to take advantage of these seasonal highs and lows.

Greyhound Lines, Inc., America's only nationwide provider of intercity bus transportation, experiences large seasonal fluctuations in both passenger volumes and incoming customer service calls. In response to these broad swings in travel volume, Greyhound has shown how a travel industry leader applies advanced technology to maximize efficiency, call center productivity and passenger satisfaction.

America's Bus Line

Established in 1914, Greyhound got its start by transporting miners between the villages of Hibbing and Alice, Minnesota for 15 cents each in a seven-seat Hupmobile. Today, Greyhound Lines, Inc. (Amex: BUS) delivers efficient and dependable service to over 2,400 destinations in the United States and Canada.

In 1995, Greyhound's 2,000-bus fleet drove 244 million miles of regularly scheduled service in the 48 contiguous states and three Canadian provinces. Greyhound remains the only regularly scheduled form of transportation between many smaller cities and towns.

To maintain its unique leadership position, the company employs more than 11,000 people, including 850 customer service representatives who respond to incoming Greyhound customer calls. Greyhound operates three full-service call centers in Dallas, Omaha, Neb., and Tucson, Ariz. The company handles more than 100,000 calls a day via a mix of automated and live-agent responses using Lucent DEFINITY and Nortel Meridian Max Automated Call Distributors (ACDs).

Greyhound customers can call a nationwide toll-free telephone number to receive fare and scheduling information or to make reservations and purchase tickets. Because travelers nationwide depend on Greyhound, the company's call center representatives must be available 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week to provide scheduling and passenger ticketing services.

"Greyhound's business is showing tremendous growth. Our calling patterns reflect our peak business seasons, so we see a large increase in customer service calls during the normal holiday and vacation periods," says Zeena Hooper, Greyhound's General Manager of Systems Services. "We manage our three regional call centers so that we can provide optimum customer service in the most efficient way possible."

A Service Challenge

The company had previously used manual methods to tabulate call center activities and to forecast future workforce requirements. According to Hooper, when Greyhound began looking for an automated solution, management wanted a system that would help reduce customer wait times and abandoned calls, while controlling call center costs and improving overall customer service. The company hoped to reduce agent idle time and to lower the total cost per call. Finally, Greyhound sought a system that would tie all three regional call centers into a single system with convenient networking connectivity, enterprise-wide forecasting and powerful management reporting capabilities.

After reviewing a number of available products, Greyhound selected and installed TotalView Workforce Management from Richardson, Texas-based IEX Corporation.

"We chose IEX because the TotalView system could easily handle forecasting and scheduling at all three of our regional call centers," Hooper reports. "We also liked the fact that with TotalView, we can re-forecast throughout the day and analyze our traffic on a team or business unit basis.

Proven Performance

TotalView is the call center industry's leading client/server workforce management system and provides comprehensive tools for forecasting short and long-term call volumes, scheduling, daily management, staff planning, team and group analysis, and database maintenance. The TotalView system operates on a UNIX server networked to one or more Windows PCs and can store and evaluate up to three years of call center activity data. Call center managers use TotalView for workforce forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, long-term staff planning, database administration, individual/team/office analysis, and activity reporting and analysis.

Greyhound uses TotalView to plan staffing, schedule employees, and manage daily call center operations. Greyhound managers cite TotalView's optimum balance of functionality and services, backed by IEX's reputation for providing effective on-going training and support.

"IEX gives us the ability to forecast with precision our call center staffing requirements," Hooper says. "They worked with our computer operations team to handle installation of the TotalView system, and IEX technicians work closely with us to ensure the smooth management and improvement of the system."

Now recognized as the industry's premier call center workforce management tool, TotalView enables companies in a wide range of industries to boost customer satisfaction and call center productivity while reducing overall operating costs.

"The TotalView system has reduced call wait times and lost calls, while improving overall call center efficiency and productivity," Hooper adds. "Agent downtime has been reduced, and Greyhound has lowered its cost-per-call; Management can now gather and evaluate detailed information on every aspect of the company's regional call center network."

And those powerful capabilities help keep Greyhound at the top of the fast-changing travel industry.

For more information about Greyhound Lines, Inc., please visit their website .