Situation

Citizens are turning more and more to social media to provide feedback on transit systems. Public Transit agencies generally lack the staff needed to provide timely and effective responses. WMATA, like many other agencies, had outgrown its base collection of legacy systems that previously supported customer communications.
In order to satisfactorily meet customer needs, WMATA required a highly-flexible and scalable solution to support customer service, customer outreach, and field service requests in a way that was both robust and affordable. WMATA sought a solution that would allow the organization to service and reach customers, regardless of communication preference.
The Authority faced significant challenges with its legacy CRM solution, including:

  • A non-configurable, one-size-fits-all system;
  • Limited incident routing with no intelligent categorization based on transit type;
  • A phone-based system, lacking natively-supported channels;
  • Social media support running in a completely separate system with no service capabilities;
  • Analytics and reporting that required IT to run queries directly against a database and share data with users via spreadsheets;
  • Limited support for notifications and queue assignments, especially for field services.

This has been one of the smoothest implementations that I have experienced within WMATA, my communication internally for the next year is: Don’t think of this as the ’complaint management system.’ Think of this as the ‘customer system of record,’ for anything that you want to be able to track in association with the customer.”

Jeremy Franklin Director of Customer Service, WMATA
Let’s Create Progress Together!

This has been one of the smoothest implementations that I have experienced within WMATA, my communication internally for the next year is: Don’t think of this as the ’complaint management system.’ Think of this as the ‘customer system of record,’ for anything that you want to be able to track in association with the customer.”

Jeremy Franklin Director of Customer Service, WMATA

Solutions & Benefits

AST understood that WMATA needed a cloud-based CRM solution and a truly modern, omni-channel system to solve specific business problems, such as lost and found management, transit- and time-based incident routing, and improved social media engagement and service. AST’s deep knowledge of the transit industry, cloud expertise, and understanding of necessary best-practices allowed our team to provide a transit-specific, cloud-based CX solution that caters to WMATA’s functional, technical, and budgetary needs.
With the modernized solution, WMATA has increased automation tools, reducing the need for IT involvement in any administrative task. Its platform can now be expanded to include additional features that are not currently required, but may be leveraged in the future. In addition, agents now have the ability to log in to the application, regardless of location, inside or outside of the firewall, to managed requests and complete tasks.

Industry: Mass Transit

Solution Components:

  • Oracle Service Cloud
  • Oracle Social Cloud
  • Oracle Policy Automation Cloud
why ast poster why ast poster

Why AST?


AST’s deep knowledge of the transit industry, cloud expertise, and understanding of necessary best-practices allowed our team to provide a transit-specific, cloud-based CX solution that caters to WMATA’s functional, technical, and budgetary needs.