Railways’ one-machine call centre
November 2004, Deccan Herald News Service, Bangalore

This machine not only answers queries on train schedules, reservation status, fares, concessions, it also helps passengers plan their journeys.

When British Rail moved its call centre operations to India a few months ago, one of the reasons was the cheap labour.

The Indian Railways, however, seems to have stolen a march on them. It has a machine to do most of this work.

Going by the response, the machine appears to be doing its job well. More than 25,000 people called in on the very first day it joined work.

Compare this, said Mahesh Kumar, Deputy Regional Manager, South Western Railways, to the mere 3,000 calls or so that used to be attended to every day, in the bad old days when there were a dozen enquiry numbers that one had to choose from to get the required information, which came from different systems.

The public found it rather difficult to remember all the numbers and what each one was for.

It was difficult to get a call through without a long wait, resulting in what are termed “unmatured calls” - calls that produced no results.

Fingertip info

Now nearly any kind of information can be availed readily at the touch of three buttons - 1, 3 and 9.

About 80 per cent of the calls, mostly mundane enquiries, are handled by the computer.

The unusual ones are transferred to agents. Incidentally, enquiries relating to ticket status, reservation, arrival and departure, fares, concessions and cancellations, are all provided by a polite female voice.

The computer also gives details about amenities in stations and trains, and even helps the passenger plan his journey.

It also advises him on what to do if he loses his ticket, wants to take break on circular journeys, wants his name changed and so on. Some of these services can be availed by SMS too.

The chances of a caller having to listen to an engaged tone are fewer because the machine handles 240 lines, up from a mere 37.

The machine is much smarter. It has an interactive voice recognition system - Microsoft’s ‘Sapi’- capable of recognising a variety of accents.

To ‘train’ it to do so, they fed it more than a thousand samples of voices, besides other names that might be used to refer to trains (Kanyakumari Express is also called Island Express, for example).

The system, which cost Rs 60 lakh and is located in the administration block of the Indian Railways, is designed and operated by RailTel, a PSU wholly owned by the Ministry of Railways. The unit was set up in 2000 by the telecom and computer experts among the Railways’ staff.

The purpose was to lease or rent out all the unused bandwidth that the railways had in its extensive optic fibre network across the country, the result of an operation for internal communication that started in the early 1980s - long before the Department of Telecommunication had laid its own cables.

RailTel started renting out its bandwidth to the corporate sector and telecom services providers like Tata Teleservices, Hutch, Airtel and Spice, with good results and in 2003-04 generating revenue of Rs 26 crore. This year, says Mr Kumar, it might be Rs 100 cr. He is not quite done yet. SMS alerts for wait lists and arrival of trains at stations, hotlines, booking for retiring rooms.

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