Tag: Salesforce

DPD Ireland Statistics

• Founded 1986
• Based in Athlone Co. Westmeath
• Expanded from 10 to 35 depots
• Handling over 35 million parcels per year
• Ireland’s largest and most technologically advanced dedicated parcel delivery company

Value added by Performa IT

• Engaged in 2017
• Sales process, CRM/account management, contact centre and customer comms solutions
• On-going monthly Salesforce support
• Major integration with parcel system planned 2021/2022

DPD Ireland’s Background with Salesforce

DPD Ireland’s implementation journey with Salesforce began in 2017.

Having steadily grown over the previous 30 years to become Ireland’s largest and most technologically advanced parcel delivery company, they were investigating CRM platforms as their next logical step.

Given the progress their sister company, DPD UK, had made with Salesforce, this was always front of mind in the selection process.

Maeve Dwyer, who was DPD Ireland’s Head of Customer Services and Marketing, describes here the experience of sponsoring Performa IT to deliver the Salesforce implementation from 2017 to 2020.

DPD Ireland’s Challenge: disjointed view of customer accounts

“As our business has grown it has become more and more difficult to manage customer information on paper, in spreadsheets and on shared drives,” says Maeve.

“With an expanding customer base it is almost impossible to keep track manually of details, events and cases that occur during each customer journey.

“The risk of delayed responses, missed opportunities and the difficulty in reporting on service performance and customer value was no longer tolerable.”

DPD Ireland’s requirement: streamlined processes and holistic customer view

“Salesforce ticked all the boxes for what we required,” Maeve asserts.

“We needed a much more robust method of gathering and managing customer and account information.

“We wanted to centralise all our customer information for consistency, and to have accurate and reliable business intelligence.

“Streamlining our processes to populate, maintain and update our account information in one place means that we can deliver a holistic view by customer across marketing, sales and customer support, right up to the executive decision-makers.”

Why Performa IT?

“We knew from our colleagues in DPD UK that Performa IT had worked very well with them in the implementation of their Salesforce programme,” Maeve comments.

“With similar requirements, and with confidence in Performa IT’s understanding of the DPD UK set up, we wanted to leverage off what had been achieved there.

“When I first met Performa IT I found them to be honest and straightforward and they quickly won my trust. I felt that I could rely on them to do the right thing for DPD Ireland, and I was confident that they had our back.

“Unlike other consultancies I’ve come across they aren’t just about selling the biggest solution. They have a good way of communicating that builds the relationship, ensuring that we were fully aware of what would be required to make the project a success, and explaining in a language that suited the various audiences they dealt with throughout the project.”

Performa IT implementation approach

Describing Performa IT’s implementation approach Maeve says: “The team at Performa worked with us to plan the different phases of implementation.

“Sales and CRM were the first modules over the line followed by the Customer Services piece.

“With Brexit on the horizon we had much to do internally to bring our systems up to speed so that they could work with the new requirements of both Irish Revenue and HMRC.

“Thankfully when Covid hit we were already ‘in the cloud’ with Salesforce so this made the transition to working from home easier.”

Solutions

End-to-end CRM/Sales Process/Document generation and Docusign

The initial implementation of CRM and Sales included automated quoting, pricing, document generation and validation.

“We now capture all the details from leads to conversions and customer interactions, which gives the account managers great information at their fingertips,” says Maeve.

“It looks great to customers and means that the account management team can run their own reports.

“There’s been huge buy-in to the platform and Salesforce has definitely become the bible of conversion information.”

Salesforce Service Cloud

Commenting on the functionality for the contact centre Maeve says: “Performa IT helped set up Salesforce to receive all customer emails and distribute them to our customer service team for action.

“Our call centre team pick up each case and complete key fields that then link back to the account. This means that each case is categorised, and we can produce reporting that helps us trend issues and deal with the source of recurring problems.

“Along with our Vonage telephony system, which is also integrated with Salesforce, we now have a complete picture of all customer contact and cases.”

Pardot Marketing Automation

DPD Ireland invested in Pardot from Performa IT primarily to assist in communications to existing customers.

“This has been really useful with regards to price increase notifications, as well as regular comms and updates about service challenges and things like Brexit and Covid,” Maeve explains.

“We haven’t really used it for marketing as such, but it’s been especially useful to generate an audit trail against each customer of what information and communication they have received from us. This makes account management conversations more targeted and direct.”

Benefits of Performa IT’s implementations

Customer intelligence

“Performa IT have helped us achieve a great CRM solution by putting all of our customer detail in one place,” says Maeve.

“This drives so many benefits for DPD Ireland, including increased efficiency, greater proactivity around issues and service, greater insight into customer value, and greater professionalism in the way we communicate.”

Streamlined conversions

Commenting on the impact of Performa IT’s integrations, Maeve says: “The introduction of Docusign definitely makes a difference to the sales process.

“Being able to get customer sign-off quickly and securely has been a very persuasive factor in driving adoption!

“So there’s been great uptake of the platform within end-to-end sales.”

Ease of deployment and on-boarding new staff members

“Since the Salesforce solution is cloud-based this makes it much easier to expand and contract our team when necessary,” explains Maeve.

“Our peak months at DPD Ireland are October to December, so in that sense we are a seasonal business.

“We have seventy contact centre agents operating across multiple sites. The Salesforce cloud model makes this more straightforward.”

Better performance management across Customer Service

“Having a standardised platform across all of our customer service teams means that we can manage performance and effectiveness better,” says Maeve.

“This also gives us a way of controlling our outsourcing spend to ensure we’re getting value for money.”

Proactive profitability reporting

“Customers, Parcels and Cases are the three pillars of our profitability so it’s crucial that we can simply and easily track and analyse how these elements are performing within the business,” says Maeve.

“Performa IT have enabled us to get the best out of Salesforce to provide this management information and support better decision-making.”

New Possibilities arising for DPD Ireland with Salesforce from Performa IT

Integration with parcel system

“At the moment, our customer service teams have to swivel between two systems to track parcels for callers and email enquiries,” Maeve explains.

“But the next big chunk of work that Performa IT will be helping us with is the integration of the customer account information with our parcel system.

“This will mean that there will be a one-stop shop for our teams to track parcels by customer.”

Recommendation

“I have no hesitation in recommending Performa IT for Salesforce implementations,” Maeve affirms.

“It’s a complex platform with enormous potential as long as it’s put together properly. Performa IT are very practical and hands-on, and their focus is on saving us time and money without forcing any particular solution.”

Performa IT says

“Maeve and her team at DPD Ireland are great to work with. They push ideas forward and want to get the most out of the platform – which makes our job easier!

“It’s been a difficult time with Brexit and Covid, which have caused some delays to key integrations.

“But the DPD Ireland IT team have made good use of the time, preparing APIs in advance, so the integration with the parcel system planned it is likely to go smoothly and guarantee very positive ROI.”

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.”