Skip to main content

Railway Bookings - Aha!

My train journeys have been on the rise recently as I have had to travel places through out India for my work. Last month it was Chennai and Karnataka and now I'll be leaving for Shirdi, this time for my own holy visit. Initially when I was in Kerala and I had to travel to Delhi every year to meet my grand parents, travelling was more of a project, but now with the ease of booking tickets through internet, it has become much more convenient and easier. The internet although has increased the efficiency, a whole new world of other factors in booking have opened up. Since I decided to make the trip only last month, there were no trains with vacant seats to Manmad and Kopargaon- the two railway stations close to Shirdi (The latter being closer).

The experience of booking the ticket on Internet also took a new dimension with many families looking to take a break in the beginning of the holiday season. The irctc website that primarily handles the ticket queries started showing the message, "The server could not process your query". I had selected Karnataka express, a train with two seats available in 'Tatkal' quota with an assumption that on the day of journey the waiting list numbers would reduce and my seats would be confirmed. After the glitch of servers, Karnataka Express showed 'W/L 1'. I had missed the two confirmed reservations that showed up on screen minutes before.

They meetThe inability of the servers to handle requests indicates only one thing. More people are on to the internet to
book their railway tickets. This could also mean that more people are using internet and that could be an indicator of increasing awareness in the consumer about services on offer and an increase in rural penetration.

Moreover the customer delight component of using irctc's service came as pleasant surprise. I got a call from a customer care saying that since I had spent over Rs 22,000 on booking tickets I would get a free membership through which I'll be eligible to seek a 10% discount on my tickets in future. So indeed a good quality and efficient service has been setup by Indian Railways.

Now the first part of the project of travel in India i.e. booking has been reduced to a mere activity for the good. The second part of travel and the schedules too has been improved as I see more trains (atleast mine) travel on time. Last month I had used the service of Indian railways thrice and my train was never late. Now since the peak season begins, it'll be interesting to see the schedule and the efficiency second part of rail travel, which I'll write about after coming from Shirdi.

Popular posts from this blog

Social Networking on Mobile - The Big opportunity for marketers

Facebook has been the dominant social network for quite a while and has an active user base of more than 1.3 billion. Its proliferation in the 18-35 years of age group (52%) makes it ideal for most advertisers. An interesting statistic to observe is the number of people accessing Facebook through Mobile. One of the biggest shifts in social media behavior has been its greater usage through mobile devices (in particular smartphones).  According to a report , the internet traffic on mobile accounts for one forth the total internet traffic. Even more important is its growth, which is over 1.5 times per year and according to analysts would stay the same way in the years to come. This shift is even more significant for emerging economies where in a sector such as e-commerce organizations are witnessing close to 65% sales through mobile.

How do brands use Instagram to connect with fans?

Instagram is increasingly becoming a favorite platforms for Brands globally to engage with their customers. It's importance can be gauged by the fact that it is the world's largest mobile ad network. Instagram now has a community of over 500 million users liking over 4.2 billion photos and sharing over 95 million pictures daily. The format of Instagram makes it a great medium for visual story telling.

Your Customer - Another line in a database

Email marketing can be the trickiest thing in the online marketing jigsaw. Most promotional emails end up as being marked as read or spam. No one cares! Well because most of the time, the ones sending it through a database also don't care.