BY MICHAEL FOREMAN
The Auckland Regional Council is automating parts of its Rideline transport advice hotline with the help of the Integrated Public Transport Information System (IPTIS) from Brisbane-based Opcom.
The council's director of information services, Tony Darby, said IPTIS would improve the standard of service delivered to Rideline's 1.2 to 1.3 million callers a year and cut training costs.
"At the moment 20 call centre operators are using half a dozen manuals that are three inches thick," he said.
"It takes up to six months to train an operator to become familiar with Auckland landmarks and the timetables and prices of bus, train and ferry services."
Mr Darby said IPTIS would reduce training times to weeks, and could deal with more complex inquiries. "It will be able to tell you the fastest or cheapest way to get from A to B or indeed from A to B to C to D."
The Opcom system has been acquired on a five-year right-to-use agreement for $312,000 but Mr Darby said it should pay for itself in two and a half years.
The system is due to go live in the first half of July after a huge data capture exercise - taking four staff three to four months - has been completed.
Data will be drawn directly from the ARC's transport planning centre, which contracts with transport operators.
Mr Darby said this data would probably be more accurate than Rideline's, and would save a duplication of effort.
"We will also be feeding customer information back into the transport centre," he said. "If someone rings up and says there is no bus service at a particular point then we will be able to capture that information.
"If we had 100 similar inquiries in a year then we would take that into account when planning services."
Mr Darby said the IPTIS system had been tried and tested in Queensland.
ARC is the first New Zealand user of IPTIS, but the system is in use on several sites overseas.
Transport hotline goes auto
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