ComfortDelGro is the world's second largest public-listed passenger land transport company with a fleet of 45,000 vehicles. The group has a global workforce, shareholder base and outlook. Headquartered in Singapore, it has operations in China, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
Catering to more than 20 million taxi bookings annually, ComfortDelGro's Customer Contact Centre is running at full capacity, with the situation becoming more pronounced during peak hours and on rainy days.
In 2007, the company started to explore more ways to automate the booking process so that its Customer Contact Centre would not be choked with calls and customers would not have to wait long for their calls to be attended to. Part of the booking process had already been automated with the broadcasting of call bookings to taxis using General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology via the in-vehicle Mobile Data Terminals.
As mobile phones are widely used in Singapore, ComfortDelGro decided to implement the Short Message Service (SMS) taxi booking service.
A closed tender was called with three vendors pitching for the project. "Our criteria were the vendor's experience in the SMS platform, its track record and support level. The platform must be able to integrate seamlessly with our existing Java-based solutions," said Wong Oi Mei, Vice President, Information Technology of ComfortDelGro's Taxi Business Unit.
After carefully considering the options available, the company decided to pick the JBoss Enterprise Framework-based solution proposed by Maven Lab, a Red Hat Business Partner under the iLIUP.
"Maven Lab's proposal matched our requirements. The Red Hat solution also offered lower cost of implementation," said Wong.
Maven Lab took three months to develop the system, running on Windows on HP Intel-based servers. A pilot run involving staff and selected customers started in January 2008 and minor tweaking was done to make the system and process more user-friendly. In April that year, the SMS taxi booking service - the first in Singapore - was launched.
The service has proven to be a hit with many customers switching from phone to SMS booking. Around 2% of all taxi bookings are now done via SMS. With further education and awareness, ComfortDelGro aims to increase this figure to 5% of all bookings by the end of 2009.
Before the SMS taxi booking service was introduced, all taxi bookings had to be routed to contact center agents. This call load surged during peak hours and on rainy days, leaving many customers stranded on the line while waiting for their call to be answered or their booking to be confirmed.
The SMS taxi booking service has reduced booking time in most instances to just 30 seconds from sending a SMS to confirmation of a booking.
"All that our customers have to do is to send a SMS and wait for a SMS response. This process bypasses the contact center agents, saving time on waiting for the call to be answered and waiting on the line for confirmation. Our customers will also not have to experience getting an engaged tone during busy periods," said Wong.
With the reduced workload due to this additional channel, contact center agents now have more time to provide value-added services to corporate customers. The service has also been a boon to another group of customers - the hearing-impaired. It was near impossible for them to use the phone booking service and often, they had to rely on others to assist. Now, they can book a taxi themselves via SMS.
Deploying JBoss cost much lesser than if ComfortDelGro had built the application on its existing environment. "If we had implemented the SMS system based on our existing software, our IT investment would have been about 60% more," said Wong.
"ComfortGelGro is using the SMS taxi booking service as another channel to help improve customer experience. Using the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Framework-based solution has ensured that the company has a stable, reliable and cost-effective system to support this service," said Hiew Wee Soon, Director of Maven Lab.
Wong is pleased with her first experience in using Open Source solutions. "We are impressed with JBoss for its reliability and flexibility. We leveraged Red Hat support for investigation and most of the problems were easily resolved. Coming from an environment that had not used Open Source software before, we are delighted with the support and service level from Red Hat," said Wong.
Building on this good experience, ComfortDelGro will be using JBoss Enterprise Framework for its customer and driver portals, both of which are expected to be launched later in 2009.
