The operator has made changes so that SNCF Connect, lambasted by customers when it was launched at the end of January, works properly.
It’s a great classic: during the Ascension Bridge where the TGVs were crowded, social networks were teeming with stories of late trains and passengers left abandoned without information. On the other hand, almost no complaint concerned SNCF Connect, the app which succeeded on January 25 to oui.sncf to book train tickets. The calm, after the storm of several weeks which had followed its launch. Inconvenient, full of bugs… critics were raining on this tool. On February 8, comedian Tanguy Pastureau summed up the general sentiment in a tweet: “I propose that the reservation of train tickets by the SNCF Connect app becomes an Olympic discipline.»
Read alsoWhy SNCF Connect went off the rails
A complex situation that Anne Pruvot, general manager of SNCF Connect & Tech does not deny: “For a few weeks, contacts with customers who wanted explanations were multiplied by three or four, while we were only expecting a doublingshe acknowledges. Since mid-March, things have been back to normal.»
The explanation? First, the old railway lady gradually handed over features offered on oui.sncf, the disappearance of which made customers scream. In March, iPhone owners were again able to store their train ticket in the Wallet, an electronic wallet. The ability to add your ticket to the calendar of all smartphones has also been restored. At the end of March-beginning of April, the downloading of a proof for a trip by TER reappeared. As early as February, the SNCF had removed a very annoying bug: on some smartphones, the QR Code of the ticket was too small and did not allow the access doors to the platform to be opened.
Read alsoSNCF Connect: after the bugs, where are the fixes?
And now users can choose a light background for the app, which was originally only offered with a dark background. In-house developers are also adding new features. For the past few days, you have been able to pay for your train tickets on SNCF Connect with dematerialized holiday vouchers. But this failed start for the railway group’s app has left its mark. During the weeks when this tool went off the rails, the French discovered that other sites were selling train tickets in France: Train-line, Omio or the French start-up Kombo. Reluctantly, the SNCF helped these competitors.
Good sales
On the other hand, there was no negative impact on sales: “We had budgeted to achieve a business volume of 5.3 billion euros this yeardevelops Anne Pruvot. Omicron had made us fall behind which we have caught up. Since January 25, we have sold 65 million tickets, representing a turnover of 1.8 billion.In addition, SNCF Connect has been downloaded 25 million times, compared to 23 million for oui.sncf.
This does not prevent the SNCF from learning the lessons of this failure. “Customers discovered the new app on January 25 without being told beforehandexplains Anne Pruvot. If we had explained to them that we intended to quickly restore temporarily unavailable functionalities, it would have been better accepted.To avoid further disappointments, SNCF Connect is currently building up a pool of 13,000 users to whom it will offer to test new features before launching them.