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In 2012, SNCF Gares & Connexions began using Salesforce to run its stations, and with App Cloud, the IT team built a new lost-and-found app with a customer-centric design approach.
Called the Oboto app, it allows customers to report lost belongings quickly and directly, while giving SNCF Gares & Connexions station agents the ability to respond and view in real time a dashboard of lost-and-found objects. One project manager and three developers built the app in just three months, and it’s been upgraded several times over the past three years since its launch.
In early 2016, SNCF Gares & Connexions introduced an e-tiquette app that further enhances the usefulness of the Oboto app. Customers now can use the e-tiquette app to register online and generate QR codes, which can be printed or displayed on mobile phones. Those same QR codes can also be printed on luggage tags and stickers to attach to traveler belongings, identifying in code the owner’s contact information.
Prior to the e-tiquette app’s introduction, unaccompanied bags discovered in train stations were handled with caution because of terrorism concerns. Even for bags bearing name tags and phone numbers, if station agents were unable to reach the owners within 15 minutes, the police were notified and the bags were destroyed. Putting e-tiquette tags and stickers on all travel belongings is the best way to guarantee that if passengers leave an item behind, it will find its way back to them.
The e-tiquette and Oboto apps have the added benefit of finally providing SNCF Gares & Connexions with a database of its customers, which hadn’t been possible for the company prior to the adoption of Salesforce. There are now 800,000 registered SNCF Gares & Connexions passengers, and as those numbers grow, the train system itself grows more secure. Found baggage with an e-tiquette QR code on it is much safer for SNCF Gares & Connexions employees to handle because they can instantly identify the proper owner from the company’s Salesforce database.