Metrorail has bought Ixchange`s Customer Ixchange (CIX) Internal to reinforce its stated aim to improve accountability and service delivery.
A division of Transnet, Metrorail provides commuter rail services on behalf of the South African Rail Commuter Corporation (SARCC), a parastatal of the Department of Transport. It manages every aspect of the process from driver hire to route planning, schedules and equipment maintenance.
"Our mandate is to deliver the service levels set by the SARCC," says IT executive manager Khaya Dlamini. "This is the benchmark by which we measure our performance."
Dlamini comments that performance measurements have tended to concentrate on financial results, with few systems in place to measure equally critical business aspects.
"In IT specifically, we needed a help desk because we had to measure and improve our customer service delivery," he says. "To realise this objective, we had to eliminate the problem of lost calls."
In the second half of last year, Metrorail undertook a four-month market scope of products and solutions that would best fit the logistical demands and financial constraints of the project. Financial shackles in particular meant limited choice, with affordability a top priority.
CIX Internal provides all the facilities of an internal help desk and offers the option to upgrade to more advanced features as and when needed. According to Dlamini, the consistent, secure asset tracking and event management facilities of CIX Internal will be invaluable in the fight against IT fraud, improving Metrorail`s accountability to its clients and employers.
"Over and above its generic help desk facilities, CIX Internal helps us track our physical assets at the same time as managing calls and equipment configurations," he says. "Not only does it fit the bill in terms of affordability, but it allows us to customise deployment according to the regional divisions and their needs."
Although it is used to monitor and display daily activity (including logged calls, frequency and problem descriptions), careful planning had to go into the licensing and distribution of CIX Internal nationwide.
"We identified a need, drew up a project plan, implemented CIX Internal and trained select staff accordingly," says Dlamini. "Our strategy was to employ three dedicated staff members per site who would be responsible for logging, tracking and charting internal service calls for their site."
This incremental approach enables Metrorail to familiarise its staff with the concept of a help desk before adding features. More importantly, CIX Internal accommodates Metrorail`s financial limitations, facilitating the preferred long-term implementation approach outlined by the national IT executive.
"We can now set and measure concrete performance targets, and aim to meet those targets," says Dlamini. "We can generate reports on common problems, troubleshoot configuration changes without costly evaluation of each fault, and monitor the location of internal equipment on a user-by-user basis from one central point."
Having satisfied its original needs, Metrorail will soon be exploring ways to capitalise on the potential of CIX as a scalable call centre solution, in line with the value-added services adopted by Transnet. The company is evaluating add-on enhancements, including an SMS messaging interface and an e-mail event escalation facility.
"Originally, our needs were purely internal," says Dlamini. "Financial considerations permitting, we`d like to add as much functionality as possible to our existing platform and offer our services to external and internal clients."
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