DHL Worldwide Express LLC UAE - Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service

Company: DHL Worldwide Express LLC UAE
Company Description: DHL Express is an international courier company. A division Deutsche Post DHL. World's largest logistics company over 220 countries in air express industry. We deliver over 1.3 billion and have more than 1,000 employees in UAE. Established in UAE in 1976 for pioneering express logistics. Today, DHL has 150+ flights daily, 8 TAPA certified facility, over 300 vehicles and processing 5,000 shipments per hour
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service - Other Service Industries

Nomination Title: Insanely Customer Centric Culture Through WFM - Workforce Management

Provide an essay of up to 625 words describing the nominee's innovative achievements since July 1 2018:

Is getting the right number of people in the right place at the right time, Workforce Management?

In our changing world where customer’s satisfaction evolved to customer experience, this is not enough. Flexibility, efficiency and accuracy is needed where technology is no longer a requirement but a necessity.

DHL drives Insanely Customer Centric Culture where our customer’s experience, needs and requirements is the center of everything we do.

Let us share with you how our Workforce Management (WFM) tool took us from “Good to Great” resulting to efficiency in our service. Ensured we deliver our customer promise of “Excellence Simply Delivered”.

WFM is an integrated set of processes that a company uses to optimize the productivity. It involves effectively forecasting staff requirements, creating and managingstaff schedules to accomplish a particular task day-to-day and hour-to-hour. Understanding our customers, there’s more in WFM than forecasting and scheduling to provide a winning customer experience.

With our WFM tool, gone were the days of manual work on call forecasting, spending days for call trends, understand impact of average handling time and other factors in call handling to come up with the most accurate forecast.

Rostering of advisors used to be a challenge. WFM Manager needs to schedule individually making sure that we have the right number of people every hour while ensuring that every one works only as per contract hours and gets equal days off weekly.

We strongly believe on “Great Service Quality” and to do that we have set our KPI target high. Answering above 90% of our calls in 10 secs, call forecast accuracy at +/-10% while maintaining call quality above 90%. Ensuring staff motivation, avoiding them to be burned out.

With our WFM Tool in Customer Service, information are available real time. Immediate analysis of call trends can be done and headcount required is easily identified by simply selecting past days or month’s data. The system then takes over and gives us forecast including required staff.

While our WFM tool made our work easier and faster, we realized there’s more to it to be able to deliver more our promise of excellence. Maximizing our tool’s potential and innovating approach, we started analyzing and did the following innovation to our tool.

-Started teaching our tool about employee working hours, shifts, weekends, holidays. Even events happening in UAE like Dubai Festival Shopping
-Created rules for schedule automation
-Incorporated staff training schedule to ensure 100% participation and learning
-Added Coaching schedule to ensure competence and confidence development of our staffs
-Made forecast interval from every 30 mins to 15mins
-Daily shrinkage used instead of monthly for more accurate forecast and staffing
-Added Grade Of Service (GOS) forecast in the next 8 intervals daily
-Productivity and Quality improvement initiative. Reducing average handling time while maintaining quality

We realized the impact through the following improvements in our performance,
-Grade of Service improved from 91% to 93%
-Abandon call rate at 0.2%
-Forecast accuracy at -3% from +/-10%
-Call Quality Monitoring score improved from 93% to 96%
-Supervisor and staff coaching hours from 52% to 60%
-Monthly Rosters sent 1 week before the succeeding month
-Staff overtime hours reduced by 44%

The continuous improvement initiative we did in WFM has won DHL Internal Award in country and regional.

With these improvements, we were able to provide high customer satisfaction, reduced customer efforts as we are able to attend to customer calls more efficiently with improved quality. These were realized through improvement of our Net Promoter Score from 46% to 79% and through our yearly Employee Opinion Survey results. Employee Engagement score improved by 2 points, from 93 to 95, Active Leadership score by 4 points from 93 to 97 and performance enablement by 3 points from 94 to 97.