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Company: Trenitalia S.p.A - manages both passenger and goods traffic
throughout the Italian railway network.
Service in operation: FS Informa, the number to ring 24 hours
a day in Italy for information on schedules, services, fares and
other general news such as delays, changes to the service, industrial
action, etc.
The solution
Loquendo integrated an effective automatic speech-interaction solution
within Trenitalia's Call Centres, which are distributed in 16 Italian
cities. The system enables Trenitalia to provide an information
service that is always up to date, that can satisfy customer demand
on a national scale and that is capable of managing peak calls and
information in real time. Loquendo's solution has made it possible
to increment both customer satisfaction by maintaining stable quality
of service as well as call centre operator satisfaction. Indeed,
customers quickly get the information they need and call centre
operators are left free to concentrate on specific customer requests.
400 channels activated, 2.000.000 calls per month managed
automatically, a success rate of 87%, 3000 recognized stations,
these are the figures on the service realised by Loquendo.
How the service works
The number to dial for FS Informa throughout Italy is
8488-88088. It provides the public with all information regarding
the rail network. The system consists of 16 call centres distributed
throughout Italy, coordinated by a national supervision centre.
Customer calls are forwarded to the call centre closest to the caller's
location. If it is busy, the call is automatically rerouted to one
of the other sites through Telecom Italia's intelligent network.
The first version of the automated system was rolled out in 1998.
Calls increased from around 600000 per month managed by operators
to a current rate of 2 million per month. Thus, with the same number
of active operator stations, the FS Informa information service's
response capacity has tripled. The number of calls manages by human
operators has considerably decreased but the quality and efficiency
of service has shot up. The probability of callers receiving an
answer has gradually risen to the current rate of 99%.
The first version of FS Informa was capable of automatically recognizing
the names of around 1400 railway stations, regardless of the speaker.
In full swing, the service's automation capacity has reached excellent
rates of just below 80% on average.
In 2001 -after conducting a survey with their customers- the Italian
Railways commissioned Loquendo to carry on with the project and
make it evolve. The following improvements were introduced:
- introduction of the speech recognition feature of key words
in continuous speech: Loquendo's Dialogos technology allows users
to express themselves in a natural manner and to provide a variety
of data with one interaction. This makes it possible to cut response
time.
An example: ... Tell me where you are leaving from, where you
want to go and when.
"I'm leaving tomorrow morning from Turin and I want
to go to Milan"
Do you want to go from Turin to Milan tomorrow morning?
"Yes" …
Continuous speech recognition was limited to the first requests.
For a greater degree of reliability and in line with the service's
previous version, it was decided that the acquisition of any missing
elements be carried out by means of isolated words.
- increased vocabulary dimension managed by the Loquendo ASR speech
recogniser, from an initial 1400 words to a current 3500, including
all Italian railway stations and many European ones.
- improved reading quality thanks to the system's new synthetic
voice - Loquendo TTS - that besides increasing comprehension rates
also guarantees excellent natural voice quality.
The new version of FS Informa, which became operational in the
first call centres at the end of 2001 -and is currently being deployed
to all the other centres in Italy- also provides information on
fares and return journeys, on all stops made by each train, specifying
all stations in the case of big cities.
Through a newly developed messaging system integrated with
the automated system and operator stations, it is possible to have
information on changes to the official timetable. This complex
Web application developed by Loquendo enables the exchange of messages
among the various Call Centres and the national supervision centre.
They convey any changes to the regular timetable caused by specific
events (problems on the lines, public holidays, industrial action,
etc.). The information is automatically transferred to both the
operator stations and the automatic systems.
Despite increased service functionality and greater speech recognition
complexity due to the growth of vocabularies and speech naturalness
granted to users through continuous speech recognition, the service's
automation rate has risen to an average of 85%. Loquendo has provided
both the technologies and the software architecture for integration
with the Call Centres, as well as the professional services for
deployment and operator training.
Further advantages can be added to the system through the automation
of other services, such as the online ticket office, seat reservation,
etc.
The FS Informa system operates from 7 AM to 9 PM in "Integrated"
mode and in "Automatic" mode at all other times:
- in "Integrated" mode, call centre operators are available
at their stations. If official Trenitalia timetable information
is required, the phone call is completely taken care of by the
automated system. If it is not successful, the first available
operator takes over the call with the requests accepted by the
system so far. The operator can thus reduce response time, correcting
errors or lack of information and forwarding the call to the automatic
response system. When the user has finished hearing the information,
he is asked whether he wishes to speak to an operator.
- after hours, the service is totally automatic and therefore
if the system fails to understand the speaker, it terminates the
call with an appropriate greeting.
All call centres are remotely controlled through the ISDN network
by automatic workforce supervision and management systems.
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