Amtrak taps 10 million online bookings through NetDespatch
27 February 2008

Amtrak and NetDespatch are celebrating after reaching a landmark 10 million online bookings. Amtrak customer taps4less.com reached the milestone while booking its daily shipment s  of bathroom supplies , to be delivered by Amtrak on a  next day  service  nationwide.

Amtrak’s business has been revolutionised by  its  Online  Collections , Despatch   and International  services     supplied by 'Software as a Service' specialist NetDespatch. Like many other Amtrak customers, taps4less.com benefits from a fully electronic system for booking, pre-labelling and tracking. T aps4less.com ship s  tens of thousands of parcels a year,  and the NetDespatch  Velocity service  has proved vital to optimising its business  by eliminat ing  the keying in of shipments , cutting out virtually all paperwork  and transcription errors .

“ The NetDespatch  service  attracted us to Amtrak as we realised we could streamline the whole operation and expand freely. In fact our whole business model relies on the efficiency provided by this web technology and we  now could not operate without NetDespatch,” says Brendan Mulvihill, Joint Managing Director of taps4less.com.

One of the biggest benefits brought to Amtrak by NetDespatch is the ease with which  their customer s can link their  order processing and warehouse systems to the NetDespatch servers via the  Internet . When taps4less.com found it could integrate so easily, the company immediately connected its own sales ordering system , so that o rder details only need to be entered once ;  usually by the customer online.

“The seamless flow of information from order to delivery is crucial for meeting the customer service levels that we have set. Little touches like the automated e-mails telling customers that their goods have been despatched are a real bonus,” says Brendan Mulvihill. “And the  up to date tracking and extra management information provided  from our NetDespatch  login is also really useful for quickly resolving customer enquiries,” he continues.

Reaching 10 million online booking s  is a real landmark. Our customers are always very enthusiastic about Online Despatch and  also  Connector, our easy web integration tool. We can thank NetDespatch for all their innovation and hard work delivering what is a clear market leader in online technology,” comments Gerry Ruffell, Commercial Director of Amtrak.