Transforming the Customer Experience in 2018
Announcement Number: CN2018-2
Categories: General Announcements
Posted Date: January 12, 2018
To Our Customers,
As we look forward to 2018, my highest priority is to transform your experience as a Union Pacific customer. When it comes to your day-to-day interactions as a consumer and as a business, you have come to appreciate business relationships that are intuitive, transparent, and provide proactive and meaningful communication to you, the consumer. You should expect that same level of service from Union Pacific, which is why we are laser-focused on making changes that will dramatically improve every interaction with our company.
To drive these changes, we have transformed the way we gather your feedback. We have hosted several customer forums, held multiple focus groups and implemented a new survey process to better facilitate actionable feedback. Your perspective is exceptionally valuable to our team, and we are more committed than ever to implement meaningful and recognizable changes.
Transformative Changes
As we’ve listened to your input, some key themes have emerged about how we can provide a better experience: improve ease of doing business, provide better visibility, communicate proactively, minimize accessorial charges and offer business insights. Below are a few of the key initiatives that I’m excited to introduce to improve in each of these key areas:
Improve Ease of Doing Business
- Shipment Management. We recently launched a new Shipment Management tool that consolidates several tools into one dashboard to make it easier to view and manage your shipments.
- Customer Registration. Becoming a new Union Pacific customer is not as easy as it should be. We are completely revamping that process to make it more intuitive and efficient.
- Website Redesign. We are redesigning our website using the latest technology to make it a more powerful tool that is easier to navigate.
Provide Better Visibility
- Simplified Shipment Tracker. We are working to simplify our shipment tracking interface to give you better visibility. Instead of pages of railroad events, we will provide only the key transit elements you need to manage your business.
- Smart ETA. This is one of our most exciting new technologies. Using live GPS readings, advanced algorithms and machine learning, we are able to more accurately predict shipment arrival times and will be providing notifications to alert you proactively. Preliminary results are significantly more accurate than our current model, and we look forward to launching later this year.
Communicate Proactively
- First- and Last-Mile Notifications. We recently launched “Local Service Today” to let you know when you will receive service at your facility. Soon we will launch “You Are Next,” which sends an alert when you are next on the delivery schedule.
- Bad Order Notification. Currently when your shipment’s rail car has a mechanical problem, the communication is very limited. We are launching a new proactive notification process to provide improved communication about bad orders and let you know when your rail car will return to service.
Minimize Accessorial Charges
- Accessorial Simplification. We are reviewing all accessorial charges to determine relevance. We have already canceled or consolidated several and will be focused on streamlining more in the near future.
- Demurrage Program Review. We are exploring alternative programs to our current demurrage process that are intuitive, transparent and easy to manage.
Offer Business Insights
- Plug and Play. We recently looked outside of our four walls to Silicon Valley for insights on how to improve our business. Plug and Play, the world’s largest startup accelerator and innovation center, invited us to be the first railroad to serve as an anchor partner on its Supply Chain Innovation Platform. In 2018, we’ll be working with the winning startups on ways to innovate in our industry.
- Locating on Rail. We are partnering with state and local economic development teams to identify and develop new rail-served business parks, so we can proactively bring you solutions for your growing business needs.
- Proactive Shipment Solutions. We are exploring services beyond rail and will be rolling out multi-modal and other service options to you when you are looking for a transportation solution.
These are just a few of the key initiatives we are excited to introduce in the coming months. Providing an excellent customer experience is a key focus for Union Pacific. In 2018, I commit to you that we will be actively engaged in bringing you new products, solutions and ideas to enhance your business.
Here’s to an exciting year ahead!
Beth Whited
Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer　
We Want to Hear from You
Do you have ideas for ways we can improve? We want to hear from you. Feel free to email our Customer Experience team. The better we can understand your experience, the better we can help improve it.