One Number Dialling

A pleasant surprise awaits you in June 2007 as the Indian
Railways brings you a surprise package. By dialing 139, passengers will be able
to obtain all relevant information needed to plan their journey, making travel
by Indian railways a pleasurable experience. This facility will enable people
located even in remote corners of the country to dial a single number at the
cost of a local call to get information on railway services. For making calls to
139 customer friendly, Hindi, English and regional languages like Marathi,
Telugu, Bangla, Tamil, Gujarati and Kannada would be used to communicate in the
call center, as per the callers choice. Apart from language support, three types
of services-Basic Enquiry Service, Premium Enquiry Services and Value Added
Service would be provided to customers.

BES will have all the current information: train position, PNR
status for reservation, fare enquiry and accident related information, etc.

PES will encompass availability of tatkal accommodation, trains
between stations, concession, cancellation, and refund rules, alerts through
IVRS, detailed journey planning, change in name etc.

VAS will offer railway ticket reservations, taxi bookings/car
rentals, hotel bookings, and any other product/service introduced by IRCTC.

Spanking Experience

To make this service a reality, IRCTC, the Indian Railway Catering and
Tourism Corporation, has selected Spanco Teleservices. Spanco will pay a license
fee of Rs 25 lakh per year with an incremental of Rs 25 lakh per year, for a
period of 10 years. It will set up, operate and maintain IVRS/ASR and Regional
Call Center's at their own cost on behalf of Indian Railway/IRCTC. A setup of
2,000 seats in the call center in the first phase, is in the pipeline. Spanco
has tied up with BSNL, as the service provider that would carry calls to the
call center. As BSNL has a reach in every nook and corner of the country, people
from all walks of life will have access to services provided by Spanco's call
center.

The deal between Spanco and the Railways is based on the public
private partnership model. Unlike selling seats at a fixed price or handling
calls for fixed rate per call, this model explores a unique way of addressing
some basic needs in a mutually beneficial manner for both. Revenues will be
generated from revenue sharing with the telecom operator for all incoming calls
ie basic and premium, SMS revenues for various services, commission on tickets,
taxis, hotel booking through the call center, advertising revenues, and any
other new service launched by the Indian Railways. Given the huge volume of
calls (16,80,000 per day) and over 400 mn commuters per year, the revenues are
expected to be in the range of Rs 800 to Rs 1,000 crore spread over the next 10
years of the contract.

Spanco, on its part, will set up four regional call centers in
the north, east, west and south zones of the country at its own cost. Railways
will provide data centers at railway stations. Spanco will invest over Rs 50
crore in terms of technology and other infrastructure to operate the service,
for capex on account of technology, obsolescence and infrastructure renewal
investment will be in tune of Rs 2 crore, and the operational expenditure for
centers will be about Rs 30 crore annually. IP based call center technology,
interactive voice response system (IVRS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR)
will be used for the setup. Nortel would be providing these technologies as well
as take care of equipments. IBM would handle software part and Oracle would be
used for handling the database.

The best point is that apart from ticket charges, customers do
not have to pay a penny for enjoying hassle free access to information. But one
has to wait till June to confirm that it's not just another customer friendly
initiative only on paper .

Sandeep Budki

sandeepb@cybermedia.co.in