About Us

Since 1986, the National Customer Service Center has been providing Union Pacific customers with fast, accurate, railcar movement data. Our support center, located in Omaha, Nebraska, is staffed by about 500 employees – offering around-the-clock service seven days a week.

Using Today's Technology to Serve Our Customers

State-of-the-art technology enables our Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) to understand your needs and then help meet them.

  • Customer Profiles: As a CSR answers the phone, a customer profile appears on their computer screen. The customer profile contains important information about you and your company, such as your name and location, the time of your last call, switching information, contact names and phone numbers, waybill patterns, car order patterns and service logs.
  • Automatic Equipment Identification (AEI) helps monitor rail car traffic in and out of rail yards. Much like a grocery store scanner reads the price of a product, AEI reads the car number of a rail car. Additionally, AEI validates that the cars on a train are lined up correctly. It is important to know the order of the rail cars and the commodity contained within each car to ensure safety for our employees and the communities we serve. It enables us to perform more accurate blocking and enhances safety awareness. AEI also verifies that a car moved from one location to another.
  • Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) offers several ways to transmit electronic bills of lading, including:
    • Mainframe EDI: Interfaces your mainframe to Union Pacific's. You can then send shipment information directly from your computer to UP's. Mainframe to mainframe capability offers a more effective means for transmitting bills of lading.
    • Steelroads Track and Trace: An internet tool that enables you to extract shipment location information from over 300 railroads in North America. By using Steelroads, you may find the latest location of shipments, trace one or many shipments, store a trace for future use, receive output in various formats, and view responses and save data to the local computer. You also have the option to cut and paste information, print it or save it for later use.
  • The UP Web site features a number of online applications through which you can get public shipping rates, trace your equipment and check its weight, receive customer notifications, and much more. More applications are constantly being developed – our goal is to make our Web site your own personal full-service customer support center, from which you can transact all of your business with the railroad.
  • Interactive Voice Response (IVR) offers other options for tracing, billing, releasing and ordering in equipment, via your telephone. Another available feature is Customer Notification – a process whereby you automatically receive a daily fax listing the locations and status of rail cars carrying your product.

See Communicating Through Technology for additional information on several of these programs and packages, including detailed benefits and the hardware and software requirements for the various systems.

NCSC Teamwork

Many questions pertaining to your shipment can be answered either by using our internet or interactive voice response (IVR) applications. These applications contain the same information as is available to our customer service representatives. Signing up for internet or IVR access is easy. Simply contact our e-Commerce Support Team at 800-872-1045.

CSRs are trained to service a particular group, or commodity team, so they are able to answer specific questions about your shipments. In addition to the commodity teams, the NCSC has additional teams who provide auxiliary support. These teams handle specific transactions and processes: order processing, operations support, service quality, billing services and the International Customer Service Center.

  • Commodity Teams: When you phone the NCSC, your call is routed to a particular commodity team, depending on the goods you're shipping. The commodity teams are: automotive, intermodal, agricultural products/energy, chemicals, and industrial products.
  • Order Processing inputs faxed customer switch requests and spotting instructions. With this team handling these critical functions, the commodity teams have more time to focus on your needs.
  • Operations Support ensures that car, train and interchange information is accurate and timely. With the help of the Harriman Dispatch Center (HDC), Operations Support manages the process of issuing work orders and interchange data to train crews. In turn, most train crews input accomplished work from their work order into a system call the Automated Train Control System (ATCS). Operations Support provides conductor help desk technical support for the train crew reporting and manages the integrity of the reporting.
  • Service Quality coordinates the resolution of service logs – researching car data and coordinating with field personnel to ensure that your railcars move as planned.
  • Billing Services generates all accessorial billing on cars and Intermodal equipment, determines the number of days a rail car was used and how long it was kept at the customer's industry.
  • International Customer Service Center (ICSC) operates much like the commodity teams and operations support groups in Omaha – the only difference being that the ICSC is in Laredo, Texas and works only with those customers who have traffic moving throughout Mexico.