SNCF Connect, the new SNCF application to become the one-stop shop for travelers

To put an end to an offer that is too fragmented, the SNCF brings together its services in a single application. Called SNCF Connect, it replaces Oui.sncf and the SNCF Assistant.

It’s the big day for the SNCF! After having offered several applications responding to different needs over the past few years, the French railway company has decided to replace them with a new application, which brings together all the services offered by the SNCF. Thereby exit Oui.sncf to book a train ticket and the SNCF Assistant to find out about the traffic situation, make way for SNCF Connect. More precisely, Oui.sncf becomes SNCF Connect and the SNCF Assistant disappears. This new digital counter is now available.

This is the unification of two heavyweights of SNCF’s digital strategy. Indeed, 145 million tickets were sold in 2021 on Oui.sncf for a business volume of 4.3 billion euros. 65 to 70% of main line tickets are purchased on the platform. The box office has 450 million visits per year, of which two-thirds on the application, and 23 million people have downloaded the mobile application. As for the SNCF Assistant, it has been downloaded 16 million times and is used every day to calculate one million routes across France. Faced with such figures, the railway company necessarily has great ambitions for SNCF Connect, which should enable the company to go from a business volume of 4.3 billion to 6.5 billion euros by 2025.

A complete offer but closed to competition

With this new application, the SNCF intends to become the point of reference for travelers for all journeys, short or long distances. In this sense, SNCF Connect makes it possible to buy tickets and subscriptions for all the lines of the railway company’s network (inOui, Ouigo, Intercités, TER, Eurostar, Thalys, Lyria) and even public transport in Ile- de-France, including the Transilien. Details remain to be settled to present certain lines abroad, like the Madrid-Barcelona offered since last year under the Ouigo brand. “It’s one of the things we’re considering for the future”assures the SNCF.

On the application, the railway company will also suggest competing offers to ensure better coverage of the territory. However, do not expect to book a Paris-Lyon with the operator Trenitalia, which launched this line with great fanfare a month ago. On this point, Christophe Fanichet, CEO of SNCF Voyageurs, was very clear during the SNCF Connect launch press conference: “Where we already have an SNCF offer, we are not going to offer a competing offer. But when we do not cover, we will offer an offer to complete. While SNCF’s position is understandable, given the imminent opening up to competition, it should however encourage the development of competing applications, such as Trainline, which allows train and bus tickets to be reserved in all of Europe. On the other hand, the railway company wishes to indicate, in the long term, the competing TER offers when these will be digitized.

A search engine for “guessing the needs of the traveler”

The application does not stop at the sale of train tickets and, to be truly multimodal, it also offers the possibility of buying long-distance bus tickets, with BlaBlaCar Bus and Flixbus, and of accessing the offers of carpooling from BlaBlaCar. Scooters, bicycles and buses for urban travel should also be integrated over time. In addition, the application aims to inform travelers in real time about the state of traffic, as well as, where applicable, exchanges and cancellations. Another novelty that should appeal to travelers is the possibility of seeing the number of seats available on board the train. Thus, sales and information are finally offered in a single application to reduce the confusion that could arise from the multiplicity of applications offered by the SNCF. It should be noted, however, that the applications reserved for certain lines, in particular for RER users or professional TGV customers, should not disappear in the short term, no doubt so as not to break the habits of travelers too suddenly.

In addition to bringing together the two flagship applications of the railway company, the main innovation of SNCF Connect lies in its search engine for planning short and long distance routes, from end to end. Powered by artificial intelligence, which has analyzed nearly 100 million itineraries to improve its performance, this tool will be based on the destination provided by the traveler from the information of his choice (an address, a station, a point of interest, a place or directly a train number) to calculate the fastest and least expensive route. With the information provided by the traveler, both from the desired destination and from previous reservations, the application aims to offer proactive and personalized support. “We changed the bodywork, but also the engine. And the engine guesses the needs of the traveler”says Christophe Fanichet.

A year of work and 300 employees mobilized

For SNCF Connect to see the light of day, a total of more than 300 employees were mobilized for a year, including 200 divided into 19 teams who coded simultaneously, so as to carry out 9,000 production launches. This resulted in 170 features at the launch of the application, this Tuesday, January 25. On the latter, 4,000 passenger scenarios are now offered, compared to 800 for Oui.sncf. For the mobile version of the application, Flutter technology was chosen to provide a consistent customer experience, whether on iOS or Android. This is the first time that this cross-platform framework has been deployed so widely in France. As for the back office of SNCF Connect, it relies on the cloud of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make the application more flexible in the face of the changes made. In this continuity, the application interface is only dark, a more readable and energy-efficient mode according to the SNCF.

Rather than designing the application in its own corner, the railway company has opted for a co-construction approach with customers and user associations. In this context, the SNCF indicates that 1.2 million customer returns have been analyzed. And before arriving at the final version, 5,000 customers were able to discover the Alpha version of SNCF Connect, between June and November 2021, and more than 4,000 people (employees of the digital division, station agents, customers, associations of ‘users…) tested the Beta version from last November. The application is now in the hands of millions of French people, who hope to travel more serenely by train at a time of ecological transition. Every day, 15,000 rail convoys circulate in France.