The business issue

DHL Norway, had seen a rapid growth in customer contact by email, with more and more of their customers now preferring to contact them by email rather than by phone. The 68-strong customer service team handles around 30,000 customer requests per month.

Unn Strand, Head of Customer Service at DHL Norway, wanted to ensure that they could maintain consistently high standards of service to customers contacting them both by email and by phone.

eTrack at DHL

eTrack is a powerful email contact management system. Customers now have a single point of entry to contact the company, via the Web site, thus ensuring that no emails are lost in the system. All correspondence to and from a customer is held in a single case file, which allows for rapid access by any member of staff. Incoming emails generate an immediate automatic response to customers, letting them know how long they can expect to wait for a full reply. Automatic monitoring flags any emails coming up to critical response times for urgent action.

DHL Norway implemented eTrack in its finance, clearance and customer service departments in November 2006. After the eTrack-supplied training course, which takes 4-6 hours, customer service agents adjusted rapidly to the new system. The claims team within the customer services department had first to resolve some internal issues of managing parallel case management systems alongside eTrack. But they were able to work with their eTrack representative to resolve these problems, and migrated to the eTrack system in March 2007.

eTrack has given DHL customers a single contact address for access to all departments. Any contact with a customer, from any part of the company, is noted against their case number, allowing quick and easy retrieval of all relevant case notes and correspondence.

Flexibility is key

The eTrack team worked with DHL to help them plan exactly how the system should be set up within the company. In fact, eTrack is so straightforward to implement that it is possible to have a five-day cycle between selecting the system and going live with it. For any implementation, the eTrack team provides advice and guidance on how the system should be structured and helps to set up all the individual elements to suit individual companies’ specific requirements. A benefit of eTrack is the ability to customise almost all elements of the system: from the content of all the automated emails; to the appearance of contact forms; and the content of drop-down menus.

At DHL, Strand is looking forward to developing the system even further, but hasn’t yet had time to fully utilise the system’s flexibility. “We haven’t made any major changes yet,” says Strand, “because we have been working on integrating the system into all our departments. We need some time to fine tune everything.”

Powerful reporting tools

DHL is a performance-oriented company where all elements of performance are measured. Unlike traditional email clients, eTrack can measure all aspects of performance, including: how long it takes to reply to each email; how many emails each person has responded to; how long it took them; even down to what the subjects of the emails were. The system incorporates powerful measurement and reporting tools, allowing for tracking such data as average response times on a company-wide and individual agent level.

Strand has found that eTrack enables her team to monitor the stage of each ‘case’, with tracking and tracing customer details becoming significantly more efficient. Automatic monitoring of all cases ensures that staff are alerted when customer emails are running close to the pre-set service response deadline.

Effective time management

Strand has found that the trend towards customer contact by email has enabled her to plan her staff time more effectively. “It has allowed us to plan our day more effectively, as not everyone needs to be by the phone all the time.” It has also resulted in a shift in the skills she requires from her customer service agents. “I like the fact that we can change the profile of our customer service agents. It is much easier to find people with computer skills. It is not so easy to get people who have a confident phone manner and are good at talking to and selling to our customers.” As a result, Strand is able to concentrate her skilled phone sales team on bookings and key accounts, leaving the remainder of customer contact to the email customer service team, via eTrack.

Key to the success of eTrack is the ability to establish company-wide protocols for customer responses. By setting up standard responses and forms, not only is the time spent on each email reduced dramatically, but the customer experience will be of a single company-wide language, to a consistently high standard. Incoming emails can be responded to by any appropriate individual within any department of the company, but will only be responded to once. Companies using eTrack have found that it reduces by 50% the time spent on each email.

Taking care of customers

Above all, Strand’s decision to implement eTrack within DHL was based on the need to ensure that customers always receive the best possible service. She has been pleased with the result: “It is a good experience for the customer. We are able to automatically feed back to them, so that the customer can see that we are taking care of them.” The conclusion? “Overall, we are really satisfied,” says Strand.

About eTrack

eTrack is a powerful tool that seamlessly integrates into your Web site and transforms the way that your company manages incoming and outgoing emails. Using eTrack, you can: create contact forms; manage automatic responses; set control and monitor automatic service response times; manage email templates; and create and control automatic documents for inclusion in emails.

With eTrack, clients have seen a reduction of up to 50% in the time spent handling customer enquiries, leading to greatly improved call centre productivity, and thus huge potential cost and efficiency savings. Conversion to eTrack, including comprehensive on-site training, takes just a few days, so that your company experiences no reduction in productivity during implementation.

eTrack customers include Shell, Eniro, Tele2, DHL, Q8 and Statoil.