When travelers are left waiting for trains, the back office often feels it first
Over 500,000 people a day rely on Southeastern Railway to get where they need to go across south-east England. Under the UK’s national Delay Repay compensation program, any customer delayed 15 minutes or more can claim reimbursement. When customers experience disruption, the Southeastern Customer Relations team is responsible for reviewing and resolving the resulting compensation claims. Prior to ServiceNow, every claim required manually checking train movement data, verifying tickets, calculating refunds, writing responses, and arranging payment.
A single major incident can generate c20,000 claims in a month. Southeastern has seen customers wait for up to 20 days for compensation, while the team raced to verify tickets, calculate payments, and answer complaints, hiring up to 50 temporary workers at a time just to keep up. Managers spent days pulling together reports from multiple disconnected systems, and identifying fraud across disconnected systems was nearly impossible.
“The slow repayment and fluctuating staffing costs had everyone frustrated, customers and railway business teams alike,” recalls David Banham, Customer Relations Operations Manager. “It wasn’t sustainable.”
To create a faster, more resilient customer operation, Southeastern unified customer operations on the ServiceNow AI Platform, creating a trusted data foundation that first automated Delay Repay and then enabled broader AI innovation.
Southeastern rebuilt its operations on platform, in partnership with UP3
Southeastern selected Customer Service Management and collaborated with ServiceNow partner UP3 to unify customer operations on a single platform.
“We’re not IT experts. We deal with the railway,” says David. “It’s all well and good having a powerful platform in ServiceNow, but UP3 was the key to unlocking that power and tailoring it to our specific needs.”
UP3 connected operational systems, ticketing data, compensation workflows, and fraud detection into one ServiceNow platform, giving contact center agents a complete view of every customer interaction. Delay Repay, complaints, assisted travel bookings, lost property, and customer inquiries all came together in one place for the first time.
"We'd solved similar challenges before, so we knew ServiceNow could bring together the customer, ticketing, and operational data needed to automate what had always been a manual process,” says Callum Ridley, Head of Architecture, UP3. “The platform gave Southeastern a foundation they could continue building on."
What started as a Delay Repay fix became Southeastern’s foundation for AI innovation
What began as a project to modernize Delay Repay quickly became a broader strategy for improving customer service with AI. After unifying customer, operational, and ticketing data on the ServiceNow AI Platform, Southeastern began identifying new opportunities to automate work, improve decision-making, and give employees more time to focus on customers.
Southeastern now processes approximately 70% of Delay Repay claims automatically. Customers who once waited weeks, now receive their reimbursement within 24 hours. Now the Customer Relations team can even handle surges for repayment in-house.
Once Southeastern unified customer, operational, and ticketing data, the organization began rethinking how customer service work happened across the business. Rather than automating isolated tasks, the team identified opportunities where AI could eliminate manual effort, improve decision-making, and give employees more time to focus on customers.
With a trusted data foundation in place, Southeastern expanded its use of ServiceNow Otto for Customer Service Management, applying AI to automate reporting, summarize cases, classify complaints, and improve customer service.
“The great thing about ServiceNow is having all of that data in one place,” says Callum. “You've got a complete view of every customer, and that's essential because AI can only succeed when it has the right data foundation.”
David brought his teams into AI workshops with UP3 to identify the time-consuming, manual tasks they wanted to eliminate.
“Staff can have a lot of resistance to AI,” says David. “I was really keen to involve the team from an early stage to help them see how AI is there to support them.”
Those workshops produced six AI initiatives designed to eliminate manual work, improve decision-making, and help employees focus on higher-value tasks. One of the first targeted the time-consuming process of major incident reporting. After any service disruption, multiple analysts spent 96 hours compiling data such as complaint volumes, compensation figures, customer sentiment, and route-level breakdowns for senior leadership. UP3 built the Major Incident Report Generator in three weeks. Using ServiceNow Otto, the tool analyzes interactions within ServiceNow and generates a complete report in four minutes.
“It reduced a really big task from 96 hours to four minutes,” says David. “And from then, we were like: okay, what can we do next?”
The team quickly expanded from reporting into work that helped employees and customers every day. With ServiceNow Otto, agents can generate a concise case summary with a click instead of reading through lengthy case notes. A chatbot built with ServiceNow Virtual Agent went live in four weeks and now handles 70% of webchat inquiries, freeing customer service representatives to focus on more nuanced cases.
With those improvements in place, Southeastern turned to the next opportunity: automating intake and identifying trends earlier. Automated case classification now assigns one of more than 300 contact categories the moment a case arrives, rather than having it sit in a queue for up to four working days.
Steady staffing and same-day safety alerts replaced surge hiring and slow reviews
The shift changed Southeastern's workforce model, not just its workflow. A single major incident once meant scrambling to onboard up to 50 temporary workers just to keep pace. Today, staffing remains steady, employees spend more time resolving complex cases that require human judgment, and managers who once spent days compiling incident reports now have complete data in minutes.
With approximately 95% accuracy, Southeastern spots emerging trends and safety issues the same day cases are submitted, turning a four-day review backlog into a same-day signal for the teams responsible for catching problems early.
These AI workflows didn't just change how the team works. They changed the customer experience. Customer satisfaction rose from approximately 82% to 87%. Average Delay Repay response time fell to 2.9 days, with automated claims frequently paid within 24-48 hours, versus the longest response time of 20 working days.
What started with service now shapes how Southeastern runs its operations
The foundation Southeastern built for Delay Repay now supports continuous improvement across customer operations. As the railway expands its use of AI and automation, employees are better equipped to respond to disruptions, make faster decisions, and deliver the responsive service passengers expect.
“All of these changes, from AI to automation, allow us to be on the forefront of performance and ultimately improve customer journeys,” says David.