Yesterday of the 500000 parcels due for delivery, only 5000 failed and maybe more missed whatever the end customer had got into their minds but was within SLA. Not your problem, you are within contract SLA and budget! Account management and Customer Service need to get their act together to manage the expectations of Clients and Customers; after all they aren’t paying enough for a ‘white glove service’. If only you had better support from your peers.

Frankly, ecommerce and mcommerce have rendered your point of view as old fashioned. Customers and their Clients expect to be treated as if they were your only customer. Your c-suite colleagues are appalled at what they read on the blogs and review sites, even if it is only the exceptions in your defence.

A wise CFO will add up the true failure cost of your easy to manage daily routine: the call centre, the redelivery of all the carded and failed SLA parcels. A wise CEO will sense the damage to Client relationships and understand they will move to the best value supplier that can deliver parcels right first time.

Perhaps feeling aggrieved that solid performance is taken for granted, you can sense the world has changed but how do you move forward, from where your operation is with all its baggage, towards becoming a customer driven business at heart?

(1) Accept the current situation cannot be sustained and build consensus for change
(2) Design an operational way of working as if it was a start-up parcel business, your business
(3) Create the business case for change, work out how to implement it
(4) Define the tools and information you need to run the new operation to show success as well as measure compliance
(5) Lead the change programme with support from your c-suite colleagues

The new operating model is likely to have all the things you have been trained to avoid over the years:

• multiple waves of activity to cover extended hours and redelivery flexibility
• constant rescheduling of the parcels at hand for the most efficient use of labour
• contact with drivers on the road so common sense joint decisions can be made
• real time operational monitoring to drive customer care
• pro-active communication sharing everything to those who might need to know
• easy contact with end customers to allow them to change what they want to happen
• partnerships for alternative delivery locations managing risk vs service for Client

All of this increases obvious costs but will drive down the costs of re-delivery and reactive customer care. Maybe yours will be the first parcel business that is ‘liked’ by its customers?

The relationship with the CIO is key to enabling the new way of working. The CIO is in the unique position of being able to provide the tools you need to be successful in creating this customer centric operation. The trick is in knowing how to get the best out of the CIO and vitally knowing what you need.

If we vision the environment of the new parcel depot, it will be an environment with a buzzing feel, where the manager will be on the shop floor leading from the front: encouraging, coaching, raising standards, instilling pride and care. A wall of the depot will have digital media devices creating the feel of the best call centre. These devices will stream KPIs, escalations, information of all types such as intake statistics. The whole business will feel inside out where the depot is the place to be, where the action happens, no longer at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy diagram. It will be as if the local management had MBO’d the depot and therefore everything matters so much more.

In this information rich depot environment, the CIO needs to provide:

• the base physical infrastructure – high speed, secure for all the private customer data and of course giving full access to the web allowing useful information to be found when required
• instant and precise updates from the road, active parcel scans and embedded GPS tracking
• every conceivable means for Customers to contact your people about their parcel
• smart data routing, getting the information to the right person who can action it
• ‘push’ technology where the necessary information is brought to the attention of those who need it when they need it
• anagement reporting that intelligently uses comparator drivers, routes and depots to suggest performance and compliance issues; sifting from the morass of activity data
• visualisation of information in a planned vs actual manner displayed over geographical image linked to real time feeds such as traffic data
  and most critically:
• A single system application that allows your most critical customer service representative (the driver) to feel empowered and to know what they should do next and where the parcel should go next. This application is of course usually delivered by their hand held terminal.
• Scalable, reliable and intuitive
• Designed for the Customer Centric parcel business
• Proven with the complexity of a network business, but hides it well
• Fast and safe to change, protecting service

This ‘what next, where next’ system should be bought and not built. Your CIO should focus on the configuration to your USPs and integration with the customer facing systems, and not engage on an exercise in being expert in solutions that are available from the IT market.

I guess you currently have one of those systems  from the ‘Track and Trace’ category, the type that tells you what happened if you have the will to look and piece the information together. That’s probably why you can’t answer the question.

This is the second in a series of articles by Chris Airey, Former HDNL CIO,  for Blackbay.