Virgin Trains is working to minimise UK rail disruption with ServiceNow

The Back on Track app connects control centre operators and frontline staff, and could save Virgin as much as £400,000 a year

Disruptions are the bane of rail traveller and operator alike. No word causes the same sullen anger and disappointment as ‘Cancelled' flashing across London Euston's billboards at rush hour.

And that doesn't only apply to commuters; often, rail staff are left to deal with the fallout with no information from the control office, or have different information than is shown on the departure boards.

It is these issues that Virgin Trains, the self-proclaimed most innovative rail operator in the UK, aims to solve with its new ‘Back on Track' disruption app, which runs on the ServiceNow platform.

"We want real innovation, and in 2019 that's got to be digital," CIO John Sullivan told journalists at ServiceNow's Knowledge 19 conference in Las Vegas. "Disruption has been around...since rail started - actually since transportation started. When things go wrong, how do you manage it?"

Pretty poorly, as it turns out: Virgin Train's Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer satisfaction, normally stands at 40; but in times of disruption, it can fall below -30. It isn't just the customer who suffers then, but Virgin's employees, too.

Left to right: Dean Underwood, Head of Technology Services and Support; John Sullivan, CIO; Barj Duhra, Services Delivery Manager

Under the traditional approach to handling disruption, frontline staff and the control centre have little contact and cannot share information easily; "It was all done on Word documents and email," said Dean Underwood, Head of Technology Services and Support. The key challenge that Virgin had to solve with its new app was to bridge that information gap.

The result, after a two-year process, is Back on Track, which Virgin will launch on Monday. At launch all of the data will be for business users, primarily staff in the control centre and on the frontline; but, using APIs, that information will also be available to customers in the future.

The app is built on ServiceNow. Virgin took the traditional route to adoption, beginning with ServiceNow ITSM and then moving it into its customer relation functions; the company now uses the platform across 15 departments, including HR, procurement and even catering.

For Back on Track, ServiceNow pulls data from multiple sources and presents it in a single dashboard. Control centre staff can use this to create ‘business incidents' to alert staff to disruptions, assign tasks (we saw a Sisyphean video of completed tasks generating new ones) and alert all relevant frontline staff.

As an example, employees in the control centre could mark a station as closed; frontline staff, with eyes on the ground, could share information with them about the number and type of passengers, for example alerting them to any disabled or vulnerable passengers. The control centre could then make sure that staff at the new terminating station were alerted to this.

Virgin believes that the app will lower the 1,500 inbound calls placed to the control team in a two-hour period by 50 per cent, and each major incident will take, on average, 20 minutes less to resolve - an estimated saving of £400,000.

Both Sullivan and Underwood were keen to add that Virgin Trains wants to share its work with the industry. The company is talking to every rail operator in the UK, as well as Network Rail, the Department for Transport and governing bodies like the RDG - taking the view that minimising disruption is good for everyone.

"There's some things you want to be competitive with and some things we just don't want to be competitive with, and we believe this is something that's good for the rail industry," Underwood concluded.

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