It’s one of those meetings. The courier’s Account Director is shuffling in her seat. Everything she says sounds eminently plausible. However well sugar coated, the message is still one of all the issues, challenges, complexity, and difficulties with consistency, long timescales to implement and train drivers which means the service is what it is, and no one else does it better as they are all at heart white van drivers.

Then of course the nail in the coffin is delivered, it’s too close to peak to embark on change. If you could roll your own eyeballs any further they may actually start to spin. You know the rest of speech off-pat; you even throw in a few other negatives through gritted teeth and emphasise that Christmas gets followed by Valentines, Mother’s day, Easter, short weeks in May and then the Summer holidays. Sometimes you feel that it’s an industry of “can’t do and won’t do”, and you get pulled in deeper into history lessons as to why things are the way they are.

Maybe that extra sugar in your cup of tea gave you the energy to rile back this time, after all you are the client and the carrier is your supplier who should want and fight for your business. You decide to list out your requirements and give six months’ notice on the contract to the Account Director to get her attention. The right response will be a price offer no doubt as part of the industries commoditisation, but it is no substitute for the increased sales from a delivery and collection service your customers like using. You write the list out for the avoidance of doubt:

1. If it’s the first time delivering or collecting for us for that customer, we would like a welcome script read.
2. For certain categories of product we would like your driver to mention the returns policy and provide accurate information as to how to get installation help; so there may be multiple things to say on bigger orders.
3. For swaps and collections we would like a checklist appropriate to the product confirmed by your driver to ensure they remember to collect items or parts for return, there may even be special instructions for this customer.
4. For certain customers we would like to have the security digits on the back of the credit card captured or other ID information so we can match it with credit application data. Trust you are PCI compliant?
5. On a sample basis we would like questions & answers from our marketing team appropriate to the customer captured on the doorstep.
6. We wish to move away from signature proof of deliveries to one-off barcode proof where we will MMS a 2D or 3D barcode image to our customer’s mobile phone (or email for printing) and your driver will scan from the phone screen. We then know it was really them receiving the correct delivery. It also allows us to trigger payment on delivery.
7. Initially for Platinum customers, off the beaten track and high query customers we are going to provide them with passive RFID tags to keep by their front door. We wish you to detect these and pass back these ‘scans’ as proof of attendance at the property. We all want to get rid of phantom carding?
8. We are going to provide an iPhone/iPad application that allows our customers to provide us with a constant GPS tracking stream. This will allow us to forward our customer’s location to your driver when it’s a critical delivery that must happen. You should show the perhaps changing location on the Sat Nav. We also wish your drivers to be able to call the customer but not see their private phone numbers.
9. When our customer care teams get an update from the customer – we want to push it directly to your driver tagged to the correct parcel record. Preferably we will be able to get replies and answer their questions in an instant messaging style. Once we have that working we will want to allow our customers to message the driver that has their parcel from their iPhone or Android device; all with hidden private data of course.

You have more ideas to drag up customer satisfaction, but that’s a good starting list. Anyway the Account Director is sucking in through her teeth so strongly you are beginning to fear for the oxygen levels in the room. After a long silence followed by a long stream of objections countered by your assertive use of the Kipling Questions, you get to the core of the answer and start having a good conversation with the Account Director. She leaves to take an opportunity back to Head Office; one that will make them the leading customer centric service provider. You hope they can see the benefits of keeping your business and saving millions from the ‘failed delivery’ cards they regularly delivery instead of the parcel.

The answer you gave her is as follows:

1. Implement a standard system application for your drivers that allows them to access all the information they need to deliver the requirements:
2. Scripts triggered by data related to the household or parcels
3. Checklists for Client and parcel content specific process steps
4.  Fast and safe change management capability for Clients to innovate service
5. Messages and messaging facility linked to the parcel information

This should be designed around an easy to change mobility platform rather than having the ‘rules’ scattered around a number of legacy systems.

1. Review your IT architecture and most importantly your data architecture for two key things
2. Stop the sequential daisy chain mind-set of data flows from the Clients web platform through to the Clients fulfilment platform through to FTP through to your core Operational systems through to the Hand Held Terminal. Think about what data really needs to go that way for core volume planning and routing, and what new data can go from the Clients web and Customer Care systems directly to and from the Mobility platform via web services. This is the key to change agility.
3. Invoice clients based on the activity triggered by the personalised level of service now possible for each parcel.
4. Embrace consumer IT and messaging that exists outside of corporate IT thinking. It is starting to get embarrassing that the customer receiving the parcel has better tools on their iPhone or Android device than your call centre or drivers. Go hire some teenagers perhaps.

The key is about having an Enterprise Mobility solution that becomes the data and integration hub for managing a configurable and personalised door step experience consistently. The rest is then down to motivating and leading your drivers to offer a compliant, value adding and friendly service now they have everything they need at their fingertips. They become customer service colleagues that are experts at doorstep experience rather than being seen as van drivers being narrowly managed. Which way of thinking will help everyone increase ecommerce sales for all of our benefit?

Rudyard Kipling wrote a short poem outlining a powerful set of questions:

I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

Keep asking these questions until you get to the heart of the issue.

Article written by Chris Airey,  Director of Vie Solutions & Former CIO at HDNL.

Prior to joining HDNL, Chris was the Group Director of IT Systems for international print and data services firm RR Donnelly covering Europe. Before this, he was on the board of the consulting division of Vertex, responsible for the front-end of engagement, solution design and overall IT strategy.

Chris also has two degrees; a BEng (Hons) in Information Systems Engineering and an MBA.