FOUNDED 
1938
SIZE 
25,000+ Employees
LOCATION 
Paris, France

French railway takes passengers on new journeys with mobile apps.

Every day, 10 million rail passengers pass through the 3,000 stations run by SNCF Gares & Connexions, the French national railroad, and are transported to their destinations on one of the world’s most sophisticated rail networks.

The
business
challenge

The business challenge

For all its efficiency, SNCF Gares & Connexions had little knowledge about its huge ridership and how to engage with these riders to build meaningful relationships. Additionally, SNCF Gares & Connexions was drowning in a sea of lost items, and had no way to contact riders to help return their belongings.
THE SOLUTION  

The
solution

The solution

To help ensure all passengers get where they’re going with their belongings, SNCF Gares & Connexions depends on two apps built with Salesforce for passenger ticketing and lost-and- found tracking. SNCF Gares & Connexions’ old lost-and-found app was expensive and complicated to run. It also offered a poor customer experience for people attempting to retrieve any of the 122,000 items misplaced in the system each year.
THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE  

10
MILLION

daily passengers.

122
THOUSAND

lost belongings reported.

Featured App: Oboto

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.

There are now 800,000 registered SNCF Gares & Connexions passengers

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.

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