Future Generation Customer Service: Using Tolling Technology to Enhance Satisfaction

Today’s tolling customers expect convenient, hassle-free experiences in their travels, and high-quality customer interaction is increasingly critical as customer expectations continue to evolve.

Customers want to access tolling services their way, using the devices they prefer and payment channels that fit their lifestyles, and they also expect agencies to proactively identify and meet their needs on a regular basis.

WSP USA is building solutions to these ongoing challenges for toll road owners, using best-in-class technology to achieve the convenience, customer satisfaction and agency trust needed to push the customer service center (CSC) industry forward.

Future Generation Customer Service

When toll road owners unbundled former turnkey methods for a variety of new systems, people and processes in the 1990s, WSP instituted its operations service integrator (OSI) approach, which is explained in a detailed WSP whitepaper report titled “Future Generation Customer Service: How agencies can evolve customer satisfaction with technology.”

The report explains how the OSI approach leads new operating paradigms by focusing on seven pillars that help clients better manage extreme changes and business disruptions. Those pillars are agility, quality, transparency, reliability, veracity, accountability and credibility.

By offering forward-looking strategic recommendations on employee performance, training and technology, WSP helps clients fulfill continuous improvements and innovations.

The whitepaper explains how creating an environment where CSC employees want to work and thrive is necessary for producing consistent, superior work. This means empowering employees to make decisions, recognizing them for their outstanding achievements and giving them honest feedback and easy methods to ask questions.

Proper employee training and ongoing education is also essential for creating a culture with comprehensive initial training and ongoing refresher sessions. Whether managing staff on-site, remotely, or in a hybrid of both workplace models, tolling technology advances are helping clients efficiently and effectively manage their personnel under their specific agency requirements, provided they are incorporating the systems customized to suit those needs.

Technology continues to drive customer service innovation, and WSP continuously guides clients to incorporate best-in-class technology that exceeds customer expectations and interacts with them through their preferred methods of contact.

To this end, the whitepaper illustrates the importance of an omnichannel telephone strategy for tolling agencies, as it lets customers choose how they connect with agencies – by phone, website, smartphone app, chat or email. 

Virtualized networks and storage infrastructures help agencies meet customer needs, while also using the power and flexibility of cloud-based systems, as well as artificial intelligence to automate their systems and facilitate interactive voice response that communicates with customers in a free-form, free-flowing manner.

Effective operation and understanding of leading-edge technology is the key to swiftly incorporate these advances into standard business practices.

Today’s tolling customers appreciate – and expect – technological solutions to handle their day-to-day needs and to provide better, faster and more consistent service. This can only be achieved with a dynamic system capable of handling a heavy workload.

Through WSP’s extensive partnerships with highway and tolling authorities, this study demonstrates how future-generation technology will continue to evolve to serve tolling customers’ increasing needs, provided those systems are designed, evaluated and maintained to adapt to that evolving landscape.

[To subscribe to Insights, contact the editorial staff at [email protected].]