Hong Kong is home to nearly seven million people, who in many ways define the urban experience. The city's residential districts of Kowloon and New Territories are among the most heavily populated areas in the world, while Central is the world's most densely populated commercial district, with almost twice as many jobs per square kilometer as Manhattan in New York City.

Due to the small portion of flatland suitable for construction, the city boasts a very concentrated high-rise environment. The more than 7,000 skyscrapers clustered in Hong Kong create a dynamic visual effect of energy and efficiency that accurately reflects the vitality of its residents.

Because of Hong Kong's dense concentration of inhabitants, the city's mass transit system is equally dynamic. The city provides a variety of public transportation alternatives with stations and stops that are within easy walking distance of most residential and commercial buildings. In addition, the various elements of the transit system are interconnected to allow easy and efficient transport from one part of the city to another. Hong Kong has also implemented an automated ticketing procedure known as the Octopus Interchange Scheme, which can be used for most of the modes of public transportation employed there.

For more than 25 years, Hong Kong has been developing its mass transit system, which has ultimately evolved into the primary means of transportation within the city. Components include subways, rail systems, ferryboats, taxis, trams, moving stairways and travelators, and a highly automated bus network that includes five different companies. Each day, more than 11 million trips are made on these various forms of transportation.

Established in 1933, Kowloon Motor Bus Company Limited (KMB) is the largest of the five competing bus companies in Hong Kong and provides approximately 30 percent of all daily public transportation trips. KMB serves more than three million passengers daily with a fleet of almost 4,400 buses. Its 30 customer service hot line representatives handle as many as 100,000 bus route information inquiries each month.

KMB recently introduced a new information system called the Digital Map Passenger Enquiry System (DMPES), which is used to assist the hot line staff. Developed with the assistance of Esri China (Hong Kong) Limited, it is based on GIS software and technology that includes ArcSDE, ArcInfo, and MapObjects Internet Map Server (IMS). DMPES optimizes the storage, retrieval, and presentation of spatial information so that hot line operators can quickly respond to customer queries. MapObjects IMS is used to georeference the starting and ending locations of a passenger's proposed trip. Then, using an attribute search and a set of relationships, the system picks the most optimal route.

DMPES enables hot line operators to quickly determine the locations of callers and identify the optimal bus route for their trip in terms of the distance to the bus stop, cost, journey distance, fastest travel time, and so on. For example, if passengers want to know the nearest bus stop, the operator can quickly check the walking distances calculated by the system and guide the passengers to the appropriate stop. As a true point-to-point routing application, the system can automatically search for bus routes by linking the beginning and ending points of a trip. It then displays the routes including bus stops and required transfers. Also displayed are route timetables and other relevant information such as the discounted fares available under the Octopus system.

Ms. P.Y. Chan, head of KMB's Customer Service Department, says, "The introduction of the new Digital Map Passenger Enquiry System at our customer service hot line significantly improves efficiency by halving the average time needed to search for route information. The handling time saved on each inquiry ranges from 30 seconds to one minute. Since we no longer need to prepare photocopies of route information for our operators, they can save time checking printed records of bus route information and save natural resources by reducing the consumption of paper."

Integrated into DMPES are more than 100,000 city features that are classified by 32 categories, such as landmarks, hotels, shopping malls, sports facilities, cinemas, housing estates, banks, schools, and so on, to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of the service. The ArcSDE and ArcInfo software-based system can alert the operators to inform passengers regarding the latest traffic news, rerouting, and relocation of bus stops. Because DMPES can display well-known features as three-dimensional images, operators can clearly describe the bus stop surroundings to the passenger.

The GIS-enhanced service has allowed the KMB hot line operators to not only provide a better quality of service but also to be fundamentally more efficient. Since its implementation, customer call times have been reduced, while the overall call center capacity has increased by around 30 percent. In addition, the time taken to train call center staff has been reduced by more than 70 percent. A comparison of hot line service performance in August 2002 with the same period in 2001 indicates an increase of more than 100 percent in customer commendations for hot line operators.

The DMPES implementation has won a number of prestigious awards including the Hong Kong Retail Management Association Customer Service Grand Award, the Hong Kong Association for Customer Service Excellence Function Award, and the Hong Kong Computer Society's 2002 IT Excellence Award-Application Bronze Award.

For more information, contact Angie Tong, Esri China (Hong Kong) Limited (e-mail: atong@esrichina-hk.com).