One of the world’s leading public transport companies, Stagecoach Group, has appointed Journeycall to handle telesales for its new low cost rail service on the south coast of England.
Megatrain.com, operated by South West Trains, offers fares from just £1 on off-peak trains between London and Southampton or Portsmouth.
The service, which launched on 14 November, follows the success of Stagecoach’s low-cost inter-city bus service, megabus.com, which serves around 40 cities and major towns throughout the UK. It already carries 1.5 million passengers a year, with Journeycall providing the telephone alternative to the online booking system.
“We are privileged to be working with Stagecoach on both their megabus.com and megatrain.com brands “ said Journeycall managing director Quentin Macfarlane. “These contracts help establish us a major provider of customer contact services for public transport operators .”
The telesales functions of megabus.com and megatrain.com both operate on 60 pence per minute premium rate telephone numbers. Journeycall keep the call revenue, making it a cost efficient way for Stagecoach to cover the costs of call handling.
The average length of a call is just over 2 minutes. If a reservation looks like exceeding five minutes the travel advisor offers to call back to complete the booking.
“While reservations on megabus.com and megatrain.com are primarily online we see the telesales function as a useful additional services for our customers,” said Stagecoach Group Project Manager George Connell. “We’ve been working with Journeycall since April and are very pleased with the service they provide, so we are delighted to award them the contract for our new megatrain.com service."
Journeycall, based at Laurencekirk in Aberdeenshire, is an18-seat call centre, specialising in public transport. “We just do trains, buses, ferries and hotels, nothing else,” said Macfarlane.“ However, we’re looking at air travel and may soon add that to our portfolio.”
Journeycall is licensed by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) to sell rail tickets, and has seen a 400% growth in ticket sales in the past six months through its FasTrack Tickets brand. Aimed at the business sector, FasTrack sells tickets both by phone and online.
The company has established a small fulfilment department for ticket sales and is staffing up to dispatch marketing and other printed matter on behalf of public transport and travel operators.
Journeycall now employs 26 staff, most of the travel advisors, and the payroll is expected to almost double by the middle of next year.
“We’re now getting a number of enquiries from other companies in the travel sector. Our advisors have a good knowledge of UK place names and I think clients realise how important it is for the people handling their calls to know the difference, geographically, between Aberystwyth and Aberdeen ” added Macfarlane.
Journeycall is now looking to open a second, small, call centre, believing that a large operation cannot provide the same high level of service to the travel industry as a compact unit of just a couple of dozen advisors.

Previous Page

Train & Bus Information and Tickets