Translink delivers first-class passenger experience, reduces average case handling time by 36%

Based in Northern Ireland, Translink serves more than 1.5 million passengers on its buses, coaches and trains every week — resulting in 44 million miles traveled each year. With a focus on enhancing the passenger experience, Translink is always exploring fresh ideas and innovative solutions. Its social media team is pivotal in this effort, not just for broadcasting updates and promotions, but also for engaging directly with passengers and actively listening and responding to feedback. 

"Social media isn’t just a content platform for us," says Mo McCauley, social and e-commerce manager. "It's a tool for taking action, addressing passenger questions and continuously improving our services and business."  
 
After reviewing its existing social media management tool, the team identified opportunities to enhance and unify the passenger experience across multiple channels. They sought a social media management and customer service solution capable of:  

• Listening across channels to monitor sentiment of the Translink brand 
• Creating comprehensive reports to drive social media strategy decisions 
• Publishing content across multiple social media profiles and platforms 
• Providing automated responses to deliver consistent support to all passengers 

The team now uses Sprinklr Social Self-Serve to publish content, monitor passenger sentiment and gather insights, and Sprinklr Service Self-Serve to respond to passenger feedback and inquiries quickly with automated support features. 

Social listening and reporting that saves time

The team uses social listening to monitor passenger sentiment, enabling them to quickly pinpoint and analyze the most important conversations about the Translink brand. “Social listening helps us identify what posts are gaining traction,” explains Mo. “If Translink is getting a lot of mentions on a post, then that tells us we want to look at it right away.” 

Sprinklr’s reporting capabilities have transformed how Mo and her team communicate with stakeholders and make decisions. Previously, compiling weekly and monthly reports consumed significant time, often spanning entire Mondays or several days at month’s-end. With Sprinklr, this process is now streamlined. A link is shared each Monday along with insights from the previous week, using data extracted from the main dashboard. This accessibility allows stakeholders across different business areas — such as NIR, Metro, and Ulsterbus — to monitor performance and sentiment through tagged data. This proactive approach not only identifies issues, like customers’ dissatisfaction with punctuality, for example, but also drives practical changes, such as increased investment in service improvements. With Sprinklr Social Self-Serve's reporting capability, Translink has accelerated responsiveness and enriched decision-making with comprehensive insights, ensuring a more informed and agile operational approach.  

Publishing social content across multiple channels at once

Translink leverages Sprinklr Social Self-Serve's robust publishing tools to effectively manage and streamline social media communications across various social platforms. With multiple operators under its umbrella, including Metro, Ulsterbus and Northern Ireland Railways, Translink faces the challenge of coordinating messages across diverse social channels and profiles, including X, which has rules against bulk sends. Sprinklr’s solution allows the team to compose messages once and schedule them across different profiles and platforms, ensuring compliance with each platform’s unique constraints. This capability not only saves time but also enhances efficiency in scheduling and managing communications, such as notifying passengers about holiday timetables or service updates. Additionally, Sprinklr’s digital asset manager empowers Translink to upload and edit images directly within the platform, further optimizing their workflow and enhancing their overall social media strategy. 
"We value its ability to upload and edit images directly within the asset manager, a feature that enhances our workflow significantly and was previously unavailable to us," says Mo. 

Delivering first-class customer support with an AI ticketing system 

To ensure its support team can respond quickly and efficiently to passenger feedback and inquiries on social channels, Translink uses Sprinklr’s AI ticketing system. Agent productivity goes up with a unified console that enables them to serve customers on their preferred channels without toggling between screens or apps. Their efficiency is further enhanced with the platform’s AI-powered boosters, like canned responses, which helps them deliver faster resolutions within SLAs. Here, the goal is to anticipate events that might lead to a higher volume of questions on particular topics, like a train station being closed. Canned responses are then created for agents to leverage in their communications with customers. "This ensures our team members are not left high and dry not knowing what to respond with or having to re-create their answers from scratch every time the question comes through,” she explains. “It saves agents a lot of time and keystrokes and creates a first-rate passenger experience by getting them answers quickly.” 

With Sprinklr’s reporting and social listening, the company can more effectively manage its eight brands and pick up on passenger sentiments across its social channels. Since implementing Sprinklr’s customer service solution passenger support  is faster and more effective than before, with average first response times reduced from 6 minutes 22 seconds to 5 minutes 22 seconds, or 16%. They have also reduced average case handling time by 36%, from 11 minutes 20 seconds to 7 minutes 16 seconds.  
 
The social media team continues to look for more ways Sprinklr can help create better connections with passengers. But on top of these operational improvements, the Translink team is just happy to work with the Sprinklr team. “Sprinklr has a very friendly and helpful team,” says Mo. “I think we've got everything we can possibly ask for.”