DHL Express India - Customer Service Complaints Team of the Year

Company: DHL Express India Pvt Ltd, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Company Description: DHL is present in over 220 countries and territories across the globe, making it the most international company in the world. DHL has its head office in Bonn Germany with a revenue size of 15.4 billion Euros. DHL is part of the world’s leading postal and logistics company Deutsche Post DHL Group, and encompasses the business units DHL Express, DHL Parcel, DHL E-commerce, DHL Global Forwarding, DHL
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Complaints Team of the Year - Other Service Industries

Nomination Title: Customer Service Complaints Team of the Year

The Customer Service Complaints team at DHL Express India has played a pivotal role in supporting business and boosting the overall image of the company. DHL witnessed stellar growth in 2021, at 23%+ revenue growth even over 2020, which was a big growth year. It is a proven fact that unless service in impeccable, especially in the sphere of complaint handling, customers will not support the business. Hence the work of the Customer Service Complaints team has been instrumental in the success of the organization.

The Customer Service Complaints team at DHL Express India has performed at an exceptional level, against the backdrop of several challenges.

We have seen a huge increase in shipment volumes, with Ecommerce surging and medical shipments increasing significantly in volume, which increased the team’s workload by almost 50% over regular volumes.

The regulatory landscape in India is complex, at the same time it is dynamic and continuously evolving. Additionally, customer anxiety for medical and other urgent shipments, constrained supply of air capacity causing delays - all created a situation of great stress for the team.

The team continued to work from their homes against the backdrop of the pandemic. They stretched from the confines of their homes to serve our customers.

Several team members or family members contracted Covid. Yet they helped one another and worked AS ONE to handle the unprecedented workload and delivered high performance and superb service recovery experience for our customers.

The result in terms of external customer satisfaction scores and internal parameters is clearly visible in the numbers enumerated below. The secret sauce behind our Customer Service Complaints team performing so well is embedded in the culture that we drive. This culture is labelled as “Insanely Customer Centric Culture” (ICCC) and this is enshrined in our Quality Policy of the organization. The Customer Service Complaints Manager and Supervisors motivate, support and inspire each team member to deliver ICCC service and this is what results in outstanding customer satisfaction.

EXTERNAL CUSTOMER SATISFACTION:

The Customer Interaction Survey, an exhaustive survey benchmarking DHL India’s service with competition in 2021 shows DHL at 10 points ahead of nearest competitor, in India. DHL shows as being Best of Breed in this bi-annual survey.

The last Quarterly Survey in 2021 where DHL ICCC service is benchmarked against competition shows DHL as 11 points ahead of competition, in India.

The organizational strategy is articulated under the following 4 Pillars. And the excellent performance on KPIs by the Customer Service Complaints team is clearly visible as below.

KPIs related to the FOCUS STRATEGY

Great Service Quality:

All KPIs for Claims & Complaints team have been in green consistently for the last two years. Every single day, our clams & complaints team delivered “Best Day Every Day”. Our Quality score for 2020 stands at 96.86% which is way higher than the target of 90% despite all challenges. Our Complaints closure performance has been at 90.05% for YTD 2021 against a target of 75%. We tracked our performance in real time, to ensure there were no slippages on the performance delivered to our customers.

Motivated People:

Every year we conduct the Employee Opinion Survey (EOS) which include 11 KPIs. Our EOS scores for 2021 are the best ever, and we have done phenomenally well in all KPIs. We scored 100% in Employee Engagement and more than 97% in all KPIs. These were amongst the best results for any team in DHL Express India. This is due to the leadership and engagement that each Supervisor drove within the team, despite being distanced in Work from Home.

Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) also tells the success story of the team. We have moved from 34% NPS in Q1 2018 to 54.34% YTD 2021, which was a remarkable feat. Our continuous improvement approach has been the reason where we are today in terms of our customer experience. Additionally, we launched several Robotic Process Automation (RPA) initiatives to cut non value added activities and increase speed of resolution.

Our monthly Root Cause Analysis was identified as one of the best practices last year. We were able to identify recurring issues and highlight it to the concerned team, to ensure that such dissatisfiers are eliminated. As an example, we reduced Post Shipping Documents related complaints by 58% in 2021 VS 2020. This helped us to save 0.9 FTE overall and bring in efficiency within complaints team, and this significantly improved customer experience. Not only that, we also reduced complaints from customers for shipments getting returned (RTO) from US due to customer error. We reduced such RTO cases to zero resulting in the saving of costs and improving overall customer satisfaction.