Blue Star Ferries new Voice Ticketing portal

Full self-service ticketing using Natural Language

• The Challenge Manage seasonal peaks in call-centre workload, while providing unrivalled customer service; use advanced technology to overcome staff availability issues; provide detailed information quickly to customers

• · The Solution Worked with IBM Advanced Business Partner Omilia to create a new interactive voice response solution to handle customer calls, using IBM WebSphere Voice Response for AIX, running on an IBM ^ pSeries model 615 server
• · The Benefits Self service customers can now access prices, timetables, and arrival/departure information on all Blue Star Ferry routes quickly and without queuing, driving out significant costs Blue Star Ferries, part of the Attica Group of shipping companies, is one of the largest ferry operators in Greece.

Headquartered in Athens, Blue Star employs 606 people and averages €130 million in revenues annually. To compete in an increasingly competitive market, the company focuses on customer service and on constant innovation to drive costs out of the business. Dionysis Theodoratos, Commercial Director of Domestic Services at Blue Star Ferries, comments: “Blue Star Ferries services up to 4 million customers every year, across multiple lines and different routes. The scope of our operations had resulted in a high volume of calls from customers who needed simple information on routes, dates, times, ships, prices and so on. Only a few of these types of calls would result directly in bookings, leading to delays for those customers who actually wanted to book tickets.” Blue Star Ferries decided to implement an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) system in order to service customers better and relieve the pressure on call-centre staff. Low cost, low footprint, high availability Blue Star needed an IVR solution that would meet its demands for near-zero downtime, and offer high scalability to meet extreme seasonal demands. Dimitris Vassos, Managing Director of IBM Advanced Business Partner Omilia, explains how the Omilia Voice Services Hosting Platform (VSHP) solution won the bid in the face of tough competition: “Blue Star decided that every call would go through the IVR, making it imperative that the platform be resilient, have high availability and have near-zero down time. “Omilia’s VSHP is integrated with the IBM WebSphere Voice Response solution, both running under IBM AIX on a pSeries server, and it offers excellent resilience within a single physical footprint. The competing solutions made use of five or six separate Intel®-based servers – a far more complicated infrastructure that would be harder to manage and scale.” Combining the WebSphere Voice Response software with a Greek-language solution from Nuance, Blue Star gained a robust automated telephone response system, enabling many basic enquiries to be handled more quickly and cost-effectively. The solution frees up skilled human resources and enables them to be deployed for more complex customer queries and booking requests. Dionysis Theodoratos comments, “Working with Omilia on this WebSphere solution is part of a long-term strategy to grow the company by helping us to cut costs, raise our production efficiency, and enhance our customer service.” Minimise staff work, maximise service To handle peaks in demand at its call centre, Blue Star previously had to hire and train temporary staff, especially during July and August, which account for up to a third of all annual calls. This meant higher employment costs and the risk of directing calls to relatively inexperienced staff. With the new VSHP and WebSphere Voice Response solution in place, Blue Star can serve up to 60 concurrent customers, or up to 10,000 calls a day. The solution can easily be scaled up to 120 calls, giving Blue Star plenty of headroom for growth. Following a successful pilot project for the new solution, Blue Star was able to make a strategic decision not to hire temporary staff, and tackle the summer peak with just half of the personnel it had the previous year. Says Dionysis Theodoratos, “During the pilot phase, we found that 70% of all calls were enquiries about such things as timetables, which the IBM and Omilia solution was able to handle with ease. With WebSphere managing much of the workload, our staff deal directly with fewer calls than before, giving them more time to focus on excellent service. Customers with simple queries can get the information they need more quickly than before, and those with more complex queries spend less time waiting for a response.”