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DHL Finance Services - Customer Service Complaints Team of the Year

 

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2019, Click to Enter The 2020 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service

Company: DHL Finance Services, Maastricht, Netherlands
Company Division/Group: DHL Express - Benelux Account Receivables department
Company Description: DHL Finance Services is part of Deutsche Post - DHL, the number one logistics company of the world and located in Maastricht - the Netherlands. With 450 employees of over 20 nationalities we provide financial services for multiple countries and business units. The nominated service line for this award is the Account Receivables department for Benelux and Switzerland.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Complaints Team of the Year - All Other Industries

Nomination Title: DHL Finance Services Maastricht - Netherlands

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

DHL Customer Accounting Back-Office driving Customer Care Standards

DHL Express puts the customer in the center of everything. Ensuring that the voice of the customer resonates throughout the organization is also essential in delivering great service quality.

To support DHL Express FOCUS strategy, Global Customer Accounting back office function has set ambitious goals to improve its customer service quality and aims to drive an Insanely Customer Centric Culture (ICCC) amongst its 2500 employees globally, dealing with over 3.2 Million billing inquiries per annum while optimizing company cash position.

After all, Customer Service is not just a role but an attitude that every employee should have to improve the customer experience, regardless the department or the function she/he operates into.

Building on an already strong process foundation, the Benelux Finance Shared Service Center located in Maastricht (NL), has initiated a 2-years journey to improve all aspects of its back-office customer service operation leading the path for the rest of the DHL Global Customer Accounting community.

The journey started early 2017 with a Customer Perceived Value (CPV) market study highlighting key opportunities and differentiators in the area of (i) the speed at which the billing inquiries are resolved ; (ii) the staff proficiency in answer those billing inquiries ; (iii) the autonomy of staff ; and, (iv) self-service capabilities.

The improvement initiatives, supported by companywide standards, were classified into four categories:

-People: Developing the core competencies required in Customer Support roles, enabling organization flexibility and, empowering and engaging them to go the extra mile to the benefit of DHL Express Customers.
-Performance Management: Addressing the Key Performance Indicators & Practices required to measure the service performance and, the standards that will help them to run a high performance call center operation.
-Technology: Deploying key capabilities (including multi-channels tools, e-billing self-service and robotic process automation) that are essential in an era of digitalization to manage customer interactions, measure and improve the Customers’ experience.
-Continuous improvement: Systematically analyzing and reducing billing inquiries, improving process throughput time while measuring customer satisfaction using Net Promoter Approach (NPA).

When the consideration of the service design choices was the main concern of the corporate leadership and service strategist, day-to-day management of the Customer Perceived Value has been a primary operational concern. Line supervision and management leading the talk on the floor and, helping every of the 65 employees of the Shared Center to understand the necessity of the change and, go through the necessary change cycle.

As a result, majority of the Customer Perceived Value and staff engagement indicators dramatically improved, setting up new standards.

-GOS (Grade of Service 90/10) improved from 76% in July 2017 to 91% Dec 2018
-ACR (Abounded Call Rate) improved from 2% in July 2017 to 0.5% Dec 2018
-TAT (Query Turn-Around-Time) improved from 50% in July 2017 to 63% Dec 2018 (same day resolution); and from 61% in July 2017 to 71% Dec 2018 (3-days resolution)
-Average Call Handling Time (AHT) increased from 210 sec to 390 sec to support same day resolution objectives
-E-Mail Handling Time reduced from > 48 working hours down to 4 working hours
Query Volumes reduced from 158 per million gross sales in July 2017 to 105 in Dec 2018
-Employee Opinion Survey(EOS) for Employee Engagement improved from 61% in 2017 to 89% in 2018
-Customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) improved by 17%

It is not the end of the journey, as we are continuously looking to improve and innovate our processes in order to provide a great customer experience with every interaction they have with our Customer Accounting Back-Office.