Cloud based solution empowers DTDC to clock 22 per cent rise in direct party sales

The cloud based sales solution enabled India’s second largest courier and logistics company to manage the salesforce better with improved visibility about their performance; the service cloud reduces the customer service TAT from days to hours

India’s second largest courier and logistics company, after India Post and a Rs 1200 crore organisation, DTDC has operations that spans across India and over 240 countries. DTDC has already implemented the track and trace systems, under which any given parcel is scanned at every touchpoint, the information about which has to be made available to the customer online.

Challenges faced
DTDC has a massive network in India and abroad. The company serves 3,000 corporate customers. “We cover 11,500 pincodes in India, through 462 offices of DTDC. The employee count is 6,500. This requires a setup, which is well aware to the happenings on the ground, has authentic data, and can quickly collect and share it with the customers, franchisees,” informs Mrinal Chakraborty, CIO, DTDC. In case, if the customer finds that it’s taking unusually long for his parcel to reach the destination after he traces it via the track and trace feature on the website, the customer’s query is solved after taking information from him via email, phone and then it’s registered in spreadsheets.

Subsequently, the backend team co-ordinates with the ground operations team (including the DTDC franchisees) to identify the issues on the reasons for the delay. The shipment is then streamlined for timely delivery. “The challenge was, this was a long drawn process, which resulted in making query resolution complicated and at times, the customer was not given the right information, because the staff did not update data,” informs Chakraborty. Each one of the close to 500 customer service representatives had their individual excel file, on the customer queries, which were sent to the backend team. They updated the file after co-ordinating with the ground operations team and emailed it back to the reps. They would then update the customer about the shipment. In summary, the process was heavily email and excel sheet driven. “It’s not just us, we have to align and co-operate with the airlines, DTDC franchisees, too and they have their individual systems,” says Chakraborty.

There were a lot of manual dependencies with disconnected systems in place. “The customer query was solved using emails, spreadsheets, etc, due to which the customer representative was not able to close loop the data, resulting in increasing the cycle time to respond and also not providing the right response, at times,” says Kalki V Yasas, Senior Director – Services, Salesforce India.

Salesforce solution
DTDC evaluated a couple of vendors and selected Salesforce. It provided a unified solution for the company. Now, the customer can raise the query through multiple channels like website, app, call centre, SMS, etc. A ticket is raised, which becomes a single point of reference for the customer for any follow ups regarding any given query. “A portal was also provided to the 10,500 franchisees, for entering the information at their end and then the service cloud for the customer service. Reps have their own respective data in accordance with the customer interaction. All these systems are tied together, so there is a single source of truth with the relevant stakeholders, which wasn’t the case before,” explains Yasas from Salesforce.

As soon as a customer calls, he is issued a ticket and gets registered on the system. Everything about the customer can be accessed using the ticket number. This system can also help in prioritising the ticket numbers to be resolved. In case if the rep is handling too many tickets, his work can be transferred to other agents. “Similarly, it can solve many other issues like, which areas are generating more tickets; the number of open tickets; the reason for tickets not getting solved. After Salesforce, the customer query resolution time has come down from days to hours,” says Chakraborty.

The huge field force of DTDC can access the app, which is synced with the core system. Thus they have the same information available with other employees. “The wave analytics feature allows DTDC to have tracking of the franchisee performance and get insights into how can they grow their business,” says Chakraborty. The service cloud can also connect with customers via the social media channel. The information can then be linked back to the customer profile.

The service console of the service cloud provides a single view of the customer related information. The console autofits the information based on the employee role and the process he is following. For example, customer service rep can view the customer profile, interaction history, real time status of any given package. A live chat functionality on the website is also available. The rep also has the knowledge repository of the historical information on the customer interactions with DTDC on all the mediums, his interaction with franchisees if any. An intelligent routing channel enables the rep to route the call to the concerned person, who is in a better position to answer the query.

Sales cloud
The typical sales pipeline process for a sales person includes: preparing the list of prospective customers; customer meetings; preparing quotations; follow ups and finally closing the sale. The salesforce solution has streamlined this process, which has made the sales executives more accountable than before. Hitherto, there was lack of visibility on the activities of the sales force and the prospects they had in their list. It was difficult to measure the following: the punctuality with which the salesforce is doing customer meetings; the number of customers moving from prospects to more probable prospects; the number of prospects the executives have in their list. This was driven through an excel file. The process was driven more on the executive’s honesty. There was no transparency and the discussion usually remained ambiguous. After the implementation of Salesforce, the scenario changed to more of daily updates and more prospective in nature. The executives now have to commit the number of prospects they will meet, inform about, how was the meeting and what was the outcome. The regional Sales Managers are more empowered and have a greater insight on the executive productivity, which is recorded in the salesforce solution. The MIS now, is more clear and granular than before. “We have grown the direct party sales, y-o-y by 22 per cent,” says Chakraborty. The sales cloud solution has had a big impact on growing the business.

The solutions implemented by salesforce are hosted on the company’s multi-tenant cloud. The infrastructure team takes the decision on where the instance will be hosted. “The apps designed by Salesforce are built for the mobile, and our apps are one of the most downloaded business productivity app from the app store. Since we follow a mobile first strategy, all the local data generated can be seamlessly integrated with the centralised database,” informs Yasas.

The pricing is license based and pay per use. “There are approximately 700 licenses that we have bought,” says Chakraborty.