Our philosophy has always been to treat our clients as partners. We endeavor to listen, understand their unique business needs, and provide our best support, advice, and guidance on maximizing the use of our solutions. We see adversities in the light of opportunities and innovation – finding new ways of doing the same things. Here’s an account of how we revisited our approach and added more momentum since the Covid times.

We See Underlying Opportunities to Boost Collaboration

During Covid the Client Services Passenger Team wanted to understand the impacts of the pandemic, and initially held webinars to discuss challenges. This led to the introduction of new functionality around demand forecasting and capacity management. We also wanted to better understand how the solutions were currently used. We would identify which modules are utilized, how key functions are configured and used, or equally importantly, not used, allowing us to be more targeted with our account management. This evolved into an internal initiative called ‘Project Discovery’ which defined three key areas of focus of short and longer-term objectives.

• User Health: Analyst workload and flow, login activity and screens used, active settings and use, key settings and configuration.
• System Health: Process performance, quarantine data, missing critical data.
• Performance Metrics/Health: Revenue capture, performance analysis, forecast accuracy.

Our first area of focus was to create system health and key settings alerting to automatically monitor critical system inputs, allowing us to be even more proactive with our technical support. This was in anticipation of moving out of the pandemic with system use returning toward normal levels, as we wanted to ensure systems were effectively configured. This was also a recognition that some assistance may be needed to get RM systems back up and running due to reduced resource levels.
We were able to identify missing inbound data, expired critical settings and processes, or missingreference data for new routes and changed schedules. This allowed us to quickly resolve these issuesor discuss and advise the client on any required changes and assist with running key processes. This has now been developed as the RTS Velocity Alert Center module and will continue to help identify anomalies and items of concern before clients may be aware of them.

We Walk The Extra Mile To Leverage In-Person Interactions

After attending our first post-covid conference, our initial chance to meet clients and peers in two years, the value of being face-to-face was clear. It was so useful to understand first-hand the changes and challenges faced. However, as our clients’ businesses are all unique, we decided a more formal process to capture and understand the post-covid RM world was necessary. In addition, we could see that client staff turnover and retirements had meant the loss of significant knowledge and know–how. Therefore, we offered several days of new or refresher education sessions, and provided these remotely where necessary. As part of this process, we created application settings and business review checklists, which can be partially completed in advance to focus agenda items and drive the discussions and education sessions. This allowed us to offer recommendations on how applications could be used differently. We could identify existing, or new settings that could be utilized and suggest configuration options or identify wider business changes and begin planning for this future direction.

Our Approach Is Always Driven By Meaning and Purpose

Rather than only having the Account Manager visit as would normally be the case, two senior RTS representatives attended to share our knowledge and widen our understanding across the client base. We felt that this has been tremendously beneficial both to RTS and our clients, strengthening the depth of knowledge and cooperation across the organizations. This is being conducted in conjunction with the major application releases, providing the opportunity to highlight and discuss our new product functionality.

We Self Introspect All Insights Gathered Through Client Collaborations

Collating the information across the client base allows us to identify trends, potentially redundant functions, those in need of refinement, or new functional requirements. This allows us to provide a consolidated focus on the product roadmap. This has provided an additional client feedback loop into our Client Services initiatives that have seen us create the CONNEXIONS release portal, revise the Help Files, include additional comparative data fields, and improve analyst workflow across key screens in response to recent client requests.

We Modify Our Value System As Needed

A formal outcome of the visits is to provide a Summary Report with Key Recommendations and to agree and prioritize action items to implement agreed suggestions. This is managed through regular account management meetings and processes. We believe our clients have found this a valuable process. We feel this has reinforced our partnership approach and continues to further develop our understanding of clients’ needs. We have enjoyed detailed discussions and providing our recommendations. We have also listened, reflected, and understood where clients would like
changes, or further development, and have received excellent ideas which we have already started work on planning for next year.

Summing Up

A partnership must be two ways. We strive for this and this is something we strongly believe in. Both sides should have the desire to see their partners succeed. We are glad that we have been able to establish such relationships with our clients at RTS and we would continue to take this forward with all our intent and effort.