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.”
