From data lakes to RPA, DHL Express leverages tech to reach its 2025 goals faster

As a marketing head, what’s your digital marketing strategy for 2020 and beyond? How is digital transformation driving strategic goals in your organisation?
Digital transformation has always been a focus area for us even before Covid-19. It is part of the DPDHL Group’s Strategy 2025, which is focused on ‘Delivery excellence in a digital world’. However, this new reality has accelerated it further.
In the last five to six years, Digital mediums have come into prominence, not just as marketing channels but also as holistic growth engines that empower the industry. At DHL Express, too, our endeavour has always been to provide seamless experiences to our customers through our resilient business model, coupled with innovation with technology at the heart of our operations. Going forward, our digital marketing strategy will involve improving and leveraging our existing channels, exploring new focus areas, driving meaningful content creation and distribution and leveraging AI & ML effectively.

From data lakes to robotic process automation, we’re leveraging every possible tech that will help us get to our 2025 goals faster.

How is DHL Express providing holistic customer experience to ensure business growth and customer loyalty?
At DHL Express, we’re proud to be propagators of what we refer to as the ICC Culture (Insanely Customer Centric Culture). It is because of this that we realise that in the service industry, one is only as good as the last experience they deliver to their customers.

In line with this, we have multiple streams of data to measure customer experience; the results of which are then channelised into different CX improvement work streams. We measure customer satisfaction through a daily pulse of NPA, a quarterly pulse of the ICCC survey and an annual pulse of the customer interaction study. All the three approaches measure incremental data points around customer experience. This is then channeled into multiple execution streams – to resolve concerns and create service differentiators.

In addition, to allow easy access to our services, we have activated all our digital platforms ranging from WhatsApp Chat to contactless deliveries. We have also introduced a Chat Assistant – which provides instant support on tracking, KYC, customs clearance, freight quotes or even shipping during Covid-19.

How are brands using digital and social media to lure buyers, how is your company leveraging the same ?
The word lure may have often have negative connotations given that it may be interpreted as convincing customers to demand products regardless of need, like dangling a bait before them. At DHL Express, we adopt a ‘People First’ approach, which prioritises customer needs and customises offerings and outreach programs basis our ever-evolving customer. Now more than ever, amid these unprecedented times it is essential to empathise with our customers and put ourselves in their shoes.

Digital has definitely brought in better tracking of the customer journey. And by using digital channels effectively to promote, interact and engage with customers, we are nudging them into faster decision making. Moreover through the course of the lockdown we have been able to effectively utilise digital marketing tools and channels to educate our customers on the various do’s and don’ts, the spectrum of our operations and our new personalised offerings to help them navigate through this crisis.

How are you grappling with the challenges of integrating technology with marketing?
Technology is helping us integrate technology with marketing. In my opinion, tech should help marketers with the following:
Churn data to reveal meaningful customer segments
Develop the right content to address these segments, and
Leverage the right channels to the fullest with the right content at the right place at the tight time
With the advent of marketing cloud solutions, it has become easier now more than ever to integrate all of these under one umbrella, giving marketers intelligent decision points and more importantly, one view of their marketing efforts.

How are you making the best use of user-generated content?
User-generated content is key when it comes to driving brand affinity and advocacy. If used wisely, it is great in driving purchase decisions too. We use user-generated content to drive our global and local partnerships.

When it comes to communicating our brand attributes of speed, passion and teamwork, these partnerships play a key role. And when it comes to amplifying these attributes, we have relied on user-generated content extensively.

How are you using data insights for generating campaigns for a specific audience?
Data collection and analysis are essential to the growth of a brand given that it gives us direct access to our customers and the ability to implement their recommendations, improve their perceptions and align with their habits, so as to serve them better each day!

Being able to collect the right data is one thing, but being able to churn actionable insights from it needs hard work. Data plays a significant role in our campaign designs. From deciding the creative set for each segment to finalising the right channel mix – all of these decisions are data driven.

It is difficult to balance customer experience and still take care of business goals. How does DHL Express strike that balance?
It is essential to remember that customers are a key stakeholder for any business and therefore both of these are a subset of the same objective.

Customer experience is directly proportional to business growth. One drives the other and technology is a key enabler. But when you are in the B2B business, it is important to add another level to it – which is the customer’s customer’s experience. We were the first company back in the 80s to introduce a package tracking system helping the receivers know when to expect their package and we continue to be the first movers in the arena 30 years later.

Given the fast growth and economic boost in the ecommerce segment, we have taken innovation and customer convenience a step ahead by introducing a worldwide On Demand Delivery application for our customers’ customers.

It is important to have a pulse on the rapid changes in customer expectation and be nimble enough to adapt at the same pace.