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BNSF Railway · A Digital CX Product

The Value of One Day.

A self-service tool that let customers view their account and pay on demand. Its quietest move mattered most: billing went out one day earlier on $14.4B in annual freight charges.

$14.4B
Freight Billed a Day Earlier
$1.1M
Annual Cash Flow Gain
2019
Relaunched, Modernized
The Product

Account information, on demand.

In February 2019, BNSF relaunched Account Status on a modernized platform: a mobile-responsive, secure Web 2.0 app with SAP in the background and customer usability at the forefront. Enhanced self-service let customers view their account and make payments as needed, on their own time, without a phone call. Customers shaped it directly: their input and feedback ran through the build.

The Mechanism

One quiet change moved millions.

The self-service front end was the visible half. Behind it, the team rebuilt the billing systems to remove delay, so invoices went out one full day earlier. On $14.4B of annual freight, a single day of acceleration compounds.

The Change
Systems updated to eliminate billing delays.
The Scale
Applied across $14.4B in annual freight charges.
The Result
Roughly $1.1M in annual positive cash flow.
On the $14.4B. This is not BNSF's total revenue. It's the primary billing that flowed through Account Status for the primary freight lines of business. Accessorial charges, auction fees, and other special freight expenses did not.
My Role

I led the leaders.

I wasn't in the department building Account Status. I was leading the people who did. I taught the team to run their own user testing, and I mentored two Finance professionals into product managers, coaching the difference between making a product and doing the job the product serves.

In short: I guided the team toward a unified experience, turned business leaders into product leaders, and shepherded this project into the One BNSF strategy. The recognition that followed was for that.

BNSF Achievement Award
For outstanding contributions to the BNSF Vision and Values.
The People Behind It
Two photos: at left, Amanda Harris; at right, the three-person BNSF team behind Account Status, standing together in front of a BNSF Railway Technology Services sign.
Left: Amanda Harris. Right: the BNSF team behind Account Status.
In Context

One of fourteen.

Account Status was one of 14 net-new products delivered under the five-year strategy to unify BNSF's digital customer experience. It is the proof that the strategy produced results a customer could feel and a balance sheet could measure.