On 1 April 2025, UIC held a Customer Experience Management Platform (CEMP) kick-off meeting for the creation of a new IRS focused on customer service in railways and train stations. The meeting was attended by CEMP members from the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), KORAIL, Dutch Railways(NS), Hungarian State Railways (MÁV), Slovenian Railways (SŽ), Trenitalia, Trains of Portugal (CP), Luxembourg National Railway Company (CFL), National Railway Company of Belgium (SNCB).
A short introductory speech was given by Bertrand Minary, UIC Head of the Passenger Department, about UIC’s current projects and ongoing strategies, underlining that more and more members are joining the organisation from around the world. Among the projects mentioned was the UIC standardisation process for 2025, which aims to review and organise each document in the UIC database so that a new IRS catalogue can be created in 2026. The UIC World Congress on High-Speed Rail was also highlighted as a key platform for fostering global collaboration and innovation in customer experience.
Jörg Ostwald, CEMP chairman and SBB employee, was re-elected during the meeting. Taking the opportunity to reflect on the past five years of CEMP’s work, he emphasised that the customer has always been the central focus and noted the group’s many concrete achievements, including workshops, guidelines, and technical visits. Ostwald then thanked the members for their strong engagement and productive teamwork, highlighting the technical visits as particularly valuable in helping the group gain insight into the customer experience across various European networks. Expressing his enthusiasm to continue the work, he also welcomed three new CEMP members: CP, Trenitalia, and Korail.
The meeting continued with each member sharing their company’s key short and medium-term customer experience objectives. A significant portion of the topics raised by the participants centred around customer information and communication, with the key actions being to develop digital platforms and apps to provide real-time, uniform information across all communication channels, as well as customer relationship management solutions. Participants also mentioned their focus and projects being to improve accessibility, multimodality, sustainability and reduce energy use.
Korail and SŽ’s representatives also underpinned the need for a global customer service benchmark, which the upcoming IRS would provide.
During the second part of the day-long meeting, a dynamic work session was held where participants were asked to brainstorm ideas related to four aspects of the customer experience: culture, stations, on-board services, and pre/post travel. They identified topics of interest and determined the most suitable key performance indicators (KPIs) for collecting the data on each topic.
By the end of the meeting, a roadmap had been established for developing an International Quality Index to support the rail sector’s efforts in improving the customer experience worldwide.
UIC would like to extend its thanks to the participants for their valuable contributions during the meeting and is looking forward to continuing to work with the CEMP members, as well as welcoming new members to the group.
Find more information about CEMP at https://www.uic.org/projects-99/article/cemp.
