IRCTC: Redefining Customer Care 

An ordinary solution, well executed, has begun to reinforce passenger confidence in the Indian Railways

The doorbell rang in the Aggarwal household at 10:30 am. Opening the door, Mrs Aggarwal received the courier packet. She gasped in amazement to find that it consisted of railway tickets that her husband had booked only the previous night over the Internet. 

Indeed, this has precisely been the reaction of anyone who has ventured to book railways tickets through the IRCTC website, www.irctc.co.in. Reactions have ranged from disbelief and amazement to thrill. How can a government agency deliver tickets so promptly and at your doorstep?

Since the time IRCTC has gone operational in August 2002, it has been performing consistently with the same zealousness.
And it has been expanding steadily into smaller towns and cities. Today, it delivers tickets to 130 towns and cities. 

Says Amitabh Pandey, group GM, IT, IRCTC, “Buying tickets online was not a new idea. The challenge was to make the system work. Going by previous experience of other online vendors, we knew that the challenge was more in the logistics. So, we were really focussed in ensuring the local delivery.” 

And the rest as they say is history. Today, it has touched the lives of many people and impacted them profoundly. The project has gone a long way in reinforcing the faith in Indian Railways. With over one million registered customers and an average of over 3,200 bookings per day, the IRCTC site is the largest B2C site in the country, according to Dataquest. Online booking has redefined customer service rendered by the mammoth organization. Passengers are relieved of the experience of interacting with unpleasant railway booking agents. Other public sector service organizations have spruced up their public relations activity in the wake of privatization and competition from private operators. But not so the Railways which has remained absolutely insulated from privatization.

Employee attitude, the sheer volume of passengers and the accompanying chaos at the booking centers make the prospect of booking railway tickets an unpleasant thought. Under the circumstances, when online booking was introduced, it came as a godsent for many people.

For one, it has made ticket booking very convenient. Railway tickets are literally at the click of a button. Just get online, login, and book. Bingo! The tickets are delivered at home next day right at your doorstep. 

This is what a reviewer says about the facility in www.mouthshut.com: “Though the procedures for booking a ticket have really become a lot easier nowadays, nothing beats sitting in the comfort of own home and clicking away.”

It saves one the hassle of going to the booking station and spending a great deal of time in making sense out of which line to queue, where to get the form from, and which alternate date or train route to book if the desired dates and trains are not available. And to top it, one has to remember the alternate trains, their code numbers and the routes like the back of one's hand, otherwise face the wrath of the booking officer at the counter. Amidst all that, one cannot totally rule out the possibility of standing for hours in a queue only to find that the booking officer has disappeared to relieve himself/herself when your turn arrives. Or better still, find the counter window unceremoniously slammed in the face because the connectivity links are down. One had to then abandon the queue in which one had spent hours and face the grim prospect of standing for another couple of hours before the job is done with. All that can be a bad nightmare if one turns to online booking. 

Avadesh Kumar Dubey was the customer to book a ticket from a mobile phone

Another benefit, that has great practical utility, is for the absent-minded people. This involves the prospect of misplacing the tickets. Often, tickets are booked months in advance particularly for the return journey and just as often these people lose the tickets. In the earlier days, one had to remember the PNR number to get a duplicate ticket. Under normal circumstances people do not remember the PNR nor keep a photocopy of that ticket unless one has already committed the crime of losing railway tickets. Without the PNR number, it is almost impossible to get a duplicate. This menace has reduced considerably with online booking, as one now gets the PNR number and other details e-mailed the following day.

A project cannot be adjudged great unless it reaches the real nooks and corners. And this project has been rolled out in distant towns. Cities like Guwahati, where the facility was made available only a couple of months ago, have already registered about 100 bookings while smaller cities like Saharanpur, Mathura, Meerut, Moradabad, Siliguri, Imphal, Shillong, Aizwal, and Agartala have also registered online bookings ranging from five tickets to 133 tickets. What's more, the facility is never promoted publicly, but simply banks on word of mouth promotion. 

“By the sheer virtue of Internet penetration, it is true that bookings are heavier from metros, but I am happy to say that the benefit has been spread across all geographies and across all strata of society,” says Pandey, who's heading this program. Even in terms of socio-economic class, online bookings reflect a very equitable distribution. According to IRCTC statistics,
47 percent online bookings are for sleeper class, 30 percent are for three tier AC, 12 percent are for two tier AC, 6.5 percent are for chair/sitting car AC, and three percent are for second class sitting.

Seeing the enormous public response to the facility, IRCTC is flooded with request from all regional offices to extend the facility to their area. Although enabling the connection is not an issue, the real issue remains in ensuring the local delivery. If the delivery is not timely, it will bring a bad name to the project.

Tickets are printed centrally in Delhi and delivered within 24 hours in Delhi and Mumbai, while it takes a maximum of three
days for tickets to be delivered in other towns and cities. IRCTC has given the contract to only one courier provider (Overnight Express) during this year. And the idea is to always go with one service provider in order to have accountability.

Speaking about the delivery system, Pandey says, “One of our early realization was that the courier delivery network in India is very strong. So, we thought we could ride on that network to launch the program. However, we have been careful to build in very stringent SLAs with the service provider.” 

And true to the SLAs, there have been instances when the tickets may have been lost in transit, but the courier company has brought the ticket on their own and delivered it before claiming remuneration from the Railways.

The IRCTC site is so popular that many travel sites have provided a link to it. Pandey says that the site has received bookings from Japan, UK, and Belgium. The tickets are delivered to tourists when they arrive in Delhi or
Mumbai. 

So, has online booking reduced the burden on railway employees? Hardly, says Pandey. The daily bookings at the Railways counters ranges from 3—4 lakh tickets. Online booking has become an additional outlet to allow bookings. So what were the challenges in implementing the system? The biggest challenge was in the basic design. The Passenger Reservation System (PRS) was not designed for self-service. Putting it online required making the system sensitive to intelligent inputs. Therefore, the major challenge was in making the system intelligent enough to make it work without human intervention. 

The system works on the BroadVision platform, which is the Web application server. The integration with PRS, in order to have a dynamic link library, was done in collaboration with the Center for Railway Information System
(CRIS). 

Payment can be through a credit card, which is executed in a secure environment through the payment gateways of ICICI, CitiBank, or American Express. The site also enables payment through direct debit Internet banking by 13 banks.

The project broke even in August 2003. The charges are minimal as the initiative is targeted at helping passengers and is therefore based on the principle of low-margin, high volume. Encouraged by the response with its online initiative, IRCTC has now embarked on a mobile journey. Recently, IRCTC launched the booking of tickets through mobile phones in collaboration with two service providers, Hutch and Reliance. The service is entirely voice-based and is expected to extend the facility to passengers on the move. Even the transaction can be made on the phone. Only registered customers can access this facility.

The first customer to book a ticket through a mobile phone is Delhi-based Avdesh Kumar Dubey who helped the organization discover a bug in the system. An old customer, Dubey could not book the ticket through his mobile phone when he tried initially. So, he called up the helplines who took his feedback seriously and together navigated through the process and discovered the bug. The booking software could not recognize the ampersand, which Dubey had used in his registration. The bug was duly rectified. IRCTC is also contemplating the possibility of connecting with ATMs to allow customers the facility of booking tickets through the terminals in order to increase the number of access terminals. As Pandey says, there is nothing new in the ideas but the challenge is to make them work. And therein lies the greatness of a project, a idea that is seemingly ordinary, but one which works for the benefit of the common man.

Balaka Baruah Aggarwal

Benefits of Online Railway Booking

Basic Statistics