DHL Worldwide Express LLC UAE - Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service

Company: DHL Worldwide Express LLC UAE
Company Description: DHL Express is an international courier company. A division Deutsche Post DHL. World's largest logistics company over 220 countries in air express industry. We deliver over 1.3 billion. Having more than 1,000 employees in UAE. Established in UAE in 1976 pioneering express logistics. Today, has 150+ flights daily, 8 TAPA certified facility, over 300 vehicles and processing 5,000 shipments per hour
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service - Other Service Industries

Nomination Title: Insanely Customer Centric Culture Thru Quick Action

In our changing world where customer’s satisfaction is based on their real time needs and requirements affected by external world, companies must align to it. Sometimes external environment demands rapid change like what Covid-19 pandemic brought. Flexibility, efficiency and accuracy is needed where technology is no longer a requirement but a necessity.

DHL drives Insanely Customer Centric Culture where our customer’s experience, needs and requirements is the center of everything we do.

Let us walk you through on how our tracking system, GEMA (Global Event Management Application) has brought us from “Good to Great” resulting to efficiency in our service. Ensured we deliver our customer promise of “Excellence Simply Delivered”.

GEMA is a tracking system we used to optimize our customer’s experience giving them real time visibility of their shipment status. It is linked to DHL website for customer visibility and other DHL applications and systems.

With GEMA we can create a request to assist customers on their queries, coordinate with our network and keep records of the progress of our customer’s request until resolution. Gone were the days of manual work of coordination and keeping our customer’s updated. A web based system thus updates are available anywhere. Giving our customers the ease of contact and update wherever they are across the globe.

However, in a short period of time, COVID-19 overwhelmed lives and businesses around the globe resulting to,

-16% NPS first 2 months of 2020
230% increased Call Center calls
+40% repeated calls
276% increased pick up request
Sudden change in country restrictions and lockdown
Health, Safety and Business Threat

Understanding real time change in customer’s needs, while our tracking tool made our work easier and faster, there’s more to it to adapt to the change and continuously deliver our promise of excellence.

We started analyzing and found out,

- Through Net Promoter Approach, our customer requires proactive notification. Requires assurance and peace of mind.

- 90% of the requests received are request to arrange change of delivery date and time, location and instructions resulting from country lockdown and government restrictions causing repeated calls.

This requests are “Quick Action Request (QAR)” processed using GEMA and received individually by delivery stations. With sudden change in customer’s needs, our current process for QAR is no longer sufficient.

We started the following innovations and approach in our QAR and GEMA tool:

We start sending delivery facilities consolidated list of shipments with QAR from our customers, 7am daily

The shipments in the list processed for priority delivery and create a shipment progress scan, “with courier”.

At 9am, customer service team call the customers advising the shipment is out with courier before they call to follow up

Those with missing shipment progress update, our customer service team coordinate with the delivery facility to check, coordinate, ensure delivery and update customer

These simple innovative use of our technology enhancing our QAR process has brought significant impact to our service,

-Shipment with QAR, from 61% to 95% delivery on time
-40% repeated calls reduction
-30% call reduction
-From 86%-93% call center grade of service
-Abandoned call rate from 1% to 0.3%
-Back office call overflow reduced from 1,600 daily to 450
-Reduced staff pressure brought by high number of calls and overflow

This innovation we did in our Quick Action Request was recognized by our MENA Regional Office and will be rolled out across countries.

With these improvements, we were able to provide high customer satisfaction, reduced customer efforts, improve quality and higher customer and employee satisfaction. These were realized through improvement of our Net Promoter Score from 70% to 85% and through our Employee Opinion Survey results. Employee Engagement score improved 2 points, from 93 to 95, Active Leadership score by 4 points from 91 to 95.