CUSTOMER SERVICE:E-ZPass System Snafu

Lockheed people say the introduction of Vector was disappointing because it wasn’t as if they hadn’t worked conscientiously to debug it before taking it up to New York. The company’s software group in Metairie LA (New Orleans) had spent months subjecting their baby to simulated operations. An early version had been taken up to Baltimore for the Maryland Transp Auth where the M-TAGs used for the Fort McHenry and Harbor tunnels had been the Vector guinea-pigs. Problems there delayed the introduction of M-TAG a few months but the fixes for Maryland had gone into the system before it was shipped to New York.

This was the big test. The world’s largest e-tag customer service center (CSC) was going on line August 9. The scene: the Clifton area of Staten Island, a 7-story high 500 foot long concrete box of a building called the Pouch Terminal, a 1920 dockside warehouse converted into offices, rented by New York City agencies, hospital administrators, lawyers where the execs on the eastern side of the building get million dollar views through wall to wall windows of New York harbor immediately in front of them, the Verrazano Narrows bridge just to the right, huge tankers and container ships going by and the statue of Liberty and the Wall Street skyscrapers on the tip of Manhattan rising up in the mists beyond.

Behind the execs offices is “the floor” as they call the open area with 120 “seats” where the CSRs have their cubicles with computer monitors. They don’t look at all regimented and they are typical bunch of young New Yorkers of every imaginable skin color, accent, dress style, probably sexual inclination – West Indians with braided hair, slight pale young women from Queens or somewhere, Hispanics, guys you would guess are Brooklyn Jews, lots of Italian-Americans, the odd East European, muscular blacks, all types. Some seem hard at work talking into their headsets, typing a bit, peering into the monitors, others lounge about, or wander the aisles. There are a handful of different departments, one area for violations where about 25 or 30 people look at screens where they pull up pictures of vehicles who have violated the posted 5mph speed limit in the E-ZPass Only lanes, others who look at the half second apart pics of vehicles which have gone through the ET-lanes without valid or operating e-tags.

Downstairs is a room where a small bunch of mostly youngish black guys inventory the tags, test them, program them, package them and get them ready for the daily US Postal Service pickup. The walk-in center nearby on the west face of the building is very modest, like a small suburban bank branch with about 4 counter staff, but apparently adequate because the vast majority of customers deal with E-ZPass by phone to the crowds of headsetted CSRs upstairs.

The New Face of the Toll Agency

The toll collector in the booth at the window has traditionally been the toll agency’s main interface with patrons but with electronic toll collection allowing the patrons to zip through an unattended lane, the customer service center (CSC) is taking over as the toll facility’s front office to the public. Over half of toll transactions in the New York area are now conducted with an E-ZPass e-tag. The number of tags has just gone over the 3 million mark represented by 1.8m accounts with 20,000 new ones being established each month. The rate of growth is much lower now than in 1997 and 1998 but the service load is heavier. People are always changing credit cards, getting new cars, selling old ones, moving houses, occasionally having a car with a tag stolen or smashed up, and almost all these events require calls, web transactions, faxes or mail. And though some of the load is due to move to Chase Manhattan’s new Secaucus NJ customer service center for the New Jersey consortium there will be a new surge of NJ vehicles equipped with E-ZPass going through the New York system next year.

Ascher eschewed the Halifax conference because what happens in Lockheed’s Pouch Terminal is nowadays the toll authority’s most sensitive person-to-person interaction with its customers. They’ve largely fixed the problems at the toll plazas themselves. They flow smoothly now, few serious backups, at least no more than anywhere else on New York roads. Most of their regular patrons never talk to a toll collector and when they think tolls they now tend to think E-ZPass, not MTA-B&T, or NYSTA, or Port Auth.

Lockheed never seems to do things by half measures. Like their big rockets that go up in a spectacular fireball, their bribery scandals that bring down governments, or provoke suicides, when they screw up toll service they do it big. When Vector went on line mid-August 1.8 million account holders received an E-ZPass ‘welcome’ letter in the mail telling them about the new features being offered, including web-based account establishment and review.

They concede that single batch of mail advertising new features was a big mistake. Moreover some of the web features didn’t work properly generating error messages, then phone calls. People were calling to change their PIN numbers. Overall call volumes rose from the high 20s to 50,000 and at the peak 60,000 per day. A bit over half the calls to the E-ZPass CSC can be handled by an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, with customers hearing a menu of choices and selecting them by pressing a key. Lockheed had been staffed up to handle about 20,000 real conversation-calls/day (with CSRs). But suddenly it was getting close to 30,000. Average wait-times went from the target 3mins to as much as 8mins and the number of abandoned calls – people who just give up – soared.

And when customers did get through, they too often found they couldn’t get proper service. Vector was down for a couple of hours at a time quite frequently in August and September. It crashed a number of times and, and with the Metairie programmers working on fixes, they had to take the system down at other times to install the revised code. A combination of increased demand generated by the single batch mailing and reduced system capability due to crashes and software fixes and the result was a customer relations fiasco.

Tabloids Hit CS Problem

The DAILY NEWS and POST picked up on customer complaints that they couldn’t through to E-ZPass in reports which MTA B&T spokesman Frank Pascual says were quite accurate. MTA B&T and NYSTA quickly agreed to fund Lockheed’s proposal to gear up to handle extra call volume. New T-1 lines were ordered, new cubicles set up and several dozen new staff hired. Normally there’s two weeks of training before a CSR is put on the phones, but the best new recruits were answering calls on their third day on the job during the emergency. Operations manager Jack Hoffman says the biggest frustration was the 5 or 6 weeks it takes to get new T-1 lines in New York: “We were at the mercy of Bell Atlantic and AT&T.”

By mid-October when we visited they said the worst was behind them but call wait times were still too long. They hoped to be providing the target level of service within a few weeks as the final batch of new lines went in and extra staff were trained. By then there will be 144 CSR ‘seats’ and to cover shifts for 7am to 7pm weekdays and weekend work over 300 CSR staff.

Hoffman says that when Lockheed got the contract to provide customer service in 1995 years ago the projection was that there would be 180k tags to handle in 3 years and they started off sizing the customer service operation to something like that. In fact after three years they had over 2 million tags to handle: “Now we’ve got 3 million and with Jersey coming along we can see 10 million tags in the region.”

One upside of the switchover to a new system is that the E-ZPass service center workers have a much better piece of software on their screens to work with. Christine, a trainer who showed us its features called Vector a “godsend” because “everything is there at the click of a mouse.” She’d been a CSR using the text-based system they called KEA after its terminal emulation software notation. CSRs had to memorize most of the detailed directions and repetitively type vehicle classes, discount plans and the like. If they couldn’t remember a detail they’d have to distract another CSR to ask them or refer to a paper manual on the shelf in the cubicle: “We had a lot of heavily thumbed rule manuals.”

The new Novell and Windows NT based ‘Vector’ system has a bunch of pulldown menus that throw up all the information they need to know on the screen to handle the four toll agencies.

“The new system is really great. It helps us a lot. We’ve got it all here (on the screen.) It makes training much easier. People catch on faster. It helps them do a better job.”

Vector allows the CSR to access a customer’s details many ways: by tag history, by toll transactions, by account balance, violations. And they can pull down details of special plans, directions, the list of metal oxide windshield problem vehicles very quickly. Everything’s there.

Hoffman says Vector went through many iterations as the software writers came up with proposals and the CSRs suggested modifications.

Lessons: (1) don’t advertise new features until you’ve checked they work, (2) don’t send 1.8m letters out in a single batch, (3) Windows just loves to crash, so think Mac, Unix, Be, anything else... (Contacts Jack Hoffman Lockheed 718 390 8700x3309 FUTURE ISSUE: Other approaches to customer service)