DPD UK Call Centre Solution Statistics
- 700 Customer Service Advisors
- 6 contact centres
- 2.75 million calls per annum
- 1.7 million email conversations
- 500 000 chats
Value added to DPD UK’s Call Centre platform by Performa IT
- Project began January 2020
- ‘Wireframe’ approach to Customer Service path analysis
- Complete overhaul of Salesforce Service Cloud implementation and integration using Lightning
- Soft launch end April 2020
- Help in reducing Average Call Handling Time (AHT) by at least 15 seconds, making £500k more savings than expected
DPD UK’s Call Centre Background
DPD UK has been a Salesforce customer since 2010 and has been using Service Cloud to manage emails since 2013, customer telephone inquiries since 2014 and live chat in 2016
Prior to the use of Salesforce, with no integration between call handling and the organisation’s operational systems, Customer Service Advisors had a very fragmented view of customer, parcel and case information.
In 2019, DPD UK took the opportunity to review their current Salesforce implementation to see what could be improved.
‘Using the best technology is key to DPD UK,” says Head of Salesforce Adam Hooper. “We are always reviewing our current solutions to ensure they provide the best experience for our employees and customers.”
DPD UK’s Call Centre Challenge: poor system availability and usability
“Salesforce is very powerful in the customer service arena, but we weren’t fulfilling the true potential of the platform,” says Adam.
“In the previous system the information was not readily available, and our Advisers had to do a lot of scrolling,” says Adam.
“There were also limits on the amount of refreshes we could do within the system, which meant that information was static rather than dynamic. Our Advisers had to go searching for updates, which meant that interactions were taking longer and ultimately costing more.
DPD UK’s Call Centre requirement: flexibility, maintainability and efficiency
“With the new features and flexibility that Salesforce Lightning in Service Cloud now offered it was an easy decision to kick off a transformation project to move to Lightning and reinvent how our call centre Advisors were using the platform,” says Adam.
To ensure all areas of customer services were represented and their ideas fed into the solution, DPD UK and Performa IT held two full days of workshops where ideas were discussed, and a rough solution was developed.
“We actually said to the call centre management ‘go crazy, tell us all your ideas, we are confident we can do most things’,” comments Adam.
“Moving to lightning allowed us to build new components that would assist the Advisors in resolving queries faster and more importantly in automating many of the previously time-consuming tasks they had to do.”
Guided Customer Service Paths
As much as possible, and to make on-boarding new starters the most straightforward it can be, DPD UK wanted the platform to guide and prompt Customer Service Advisors through their workflow, from parcel tracking enquiries, complaints, changes and collection issues, to credit management and exports. The new system would tell advisors the available options and the questions to ask, rather than advisors having to remember from their training.
Enhanced automation
DPD UK required emails, case comments and system field updates to be automated to make Advisors’ interactions more straightforward and ultimately reduce the time advisors spent working on enquires. At the volume of enquires DPD UK handles, any reduction in time, even seconds, adds up to meaningful savings.
Reduced risk of processing limit breaches and improved Average Call Handling Time
To reduce processing time there was much to do to quickly assimilate all the required information and ensure painless access to other systems. This was key in reducing the average call handling time also. DPD UK wanted to shave at least 15 seconds off each call on average, amounting to an annual saving of £150 000.
“Strategically we want the Salesforce platform to be doing all the heavy-lifting in terms of call centre processes, so staff can just come in to work and have everything they need to do their job available in front of them,” says Adam.
Why Performa IT?
As DPD UK’s trusted and long-standing Salesforce Consulting partner since 2016, Performa IT was called in to tackle the Call Centre redesign and system upgrade.
Having worked on DPD UK’s previous Service Cloud solution including the development of Entitlements, Milestones and complex custom code, Performa IT already had deep knowledge of DPD’s Service Cloud set up to draw on.
“I had 100% confidence that Performa IT are knowledgeable enough development experts to understand what we wanted to achieve and then deliver it,” says Adam.
Performa IT implementation approach
Requirements Analysis
Using “low fidelity” MS Powerpoint wireframes, Performa IT worked closely with DPD UK frontline user representatives to analyse the essential conditions and paths through the complete set of customer service scenarios.
Depending on the answers to scripted service questions, the concept of “available actions” was used to narrow down the options facing an Agent and trigger further resolution paths.
Design Principles
In resolving the processing capacity issues Performa IT were keen to identify the critical success criteria of the Service Agent’s experience.
These included the need to always stay within the Salesforce Service Cloud console, and to have automated case and task execution at the click of a button.
Swift presentation of information, direct and seamless access to DPD UK’s core parcel delivery system as well as on screen guidance about available actions guaranteed good performance during live phone conversations.
Code-based build
The key consideration in development was to avoid performance issues that would jeopardise the Agent’s experience during each customer service call and incur costly processing cap breaches.
DPD UK and Performa IT therefore made the joint decision to customise and configure as much as possible.
This involved developing APIs and building Lightning components to execute workflows as efficiently as possible.
Commenting on the implementation approach taken by Performa IT, Adam says:
“Performa IT helped us understand more and more about what was possible during the implementation. This inspired us to evolve the features further to enhance what was delivered.
“Since Performa IT work in a very fast and agile way they were able to provide an optimal solution to our Service team.”
Results and Benefits
“Our Salesforce Call Centre implementation was completed in four months,” says Adam. “My team in collaboration with Performa-IT delivered all of the items the Call Centre management asked for and many more.
“12 weeks post-implementation we started to see some incredible results that smashed our original expectations.
“For example we originally specified a AHT reduction from 5 minutes 40 seconds to 5 minutes 25 seconds.
“In reality the AHT was slashed to 4 minutes 21 seconds – 5 times more than we’d anticipated!
“Where we were hoping to achieve annual call cost savings of about £150 000, we’ve actually achieved a direct saving of over £500 000 more!
“And this is without factoring in the indirect savings associated with quicker on-boarding, error reduction and customer and Agent retention.
“These results are spectacular and have prompted Salesforce to showcase our solution. They send big corporate clients to us to demonstrate what we’ve done.”
New Call Centre Possibilities arising for DPD UK
“The flexibility in the new platform means that there is pretty much nothing we can’t do with it,” says Adam.
“For example instead of incurring a weeklong development to add the option of delivering parcels to shops we were able to add it straightaway, like magic.
“The possibilities are endless because the development cycle has been shortened drastically thanks to the platform’s flexibility.”
Recommendation
“Performa IT is made up of the exact calibre of people I would want to recruit,” says Adam.
“They are smart people who make things happen and I’m constantly recommending them!
“They are part of the entire process, from collaborating on requirements and design to technical architecture and making sure what we implement in the Call Centre doesn’t break the rest of the system.”
Performa IT says
“We love working with DPD UK!
“They have been the catalyst for our growth and helped us motivate brilliantly skilled developers who really know their stuff and are passionate about our clients’ success.
“We are thrilled that the solution for DPD UK is such a beacon for Salesforce too. It’s a useful reference point and Case Study for them. They have also adopted some of the architecture for their own products.
“We’re looking forward to helping Adam and his team achieve more in the future.”