Case Study: Amtrak achieves 53% higher customer satisfaction with Nuance Communications' "Julie" speech-enabled self-service

Amtrak's Julie gets callers on board

Amtrak turned to Nuance Communications to overhaul its phone-based customer service so the 84,000 daily passengers who call about schedules, fares, train status and reservations could get fast, intuitive answers. The challenge was to replace a legacy touch-tone system that drove many callers to agents and to support extensive grammar and destination coverage across Amtrak’s national network.

Nuance Communications implemented a speech-enabled self-service IVR—branded as “Julie”—using Nuance speech recognition, VXML applications, Professional Services and Business Consulting to integrate with CTI and web services and scale recognition from ~1,000 to 45,000 place names. The solution now handles roughly 20 million calls a year (an average of ~50,000/day, peaking at 95,000), increased customer satisfaction by 53% versus the old touch-tone system, fully handles about 25% of 800-number calls (~5 million/year), and enabled more self-service transactions (including $2M+ in phone reservations the month new payments launched).

Amtrak

Emily Yellin

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