PostNL
“With Salesforce, we can innovate faster, integrate smarter and collaborate better.”
Innovative application and unified processes empower PostNL’s mail and parcel teams to deliver a better employee experience
PostNL’s business is not about the millions of letters and parcels that it handles every day, but the millions of people sending, delivering and receiving these items. With Salesforce, PostNL can keep people at the heart of its business. It can improve employee engagement, enable new business models and enhance service quality. With Salesforce, PostNL can deliver on its promises.
PostNL wants to make the lives of its customers easier. And that means making every interaction easier. “We want customers to engage with us as one company; at the moment we are too many companies within one,” comments Marcel Krom, CIO at Post NL.
As part of its OnePostNL vision, the mail and parcels company is on a standardisation mission. Every process, every service, every customer touch point will be based on the same solid foundations. “If you want to win on the outside, you have to start on the inside,” says Krom.
Thanks to Salesforce, PostNL has got off to a flying start, unifying its customer support operation, tracking its social footprint and transforming communication with its mail delivery teams.
“We are never satisfied with what we have achieved today; we always aspire to achieve more tomorrow,” comments Krom. “With Salesforce, we can innovate faster, integrate smarter and collaborate better.”
Keeping staff posted
Introducing a corporate community was an important first step in opening up the collaboration door. “Our teams span a wide age group, so we knew we would need a multi-channel strategy,” explains Krom. “We challenged Salesforce to come with an idea. The demo that Salesforce developed in a week took us to the next step with Salesforce.”
Founded in 2014, the community platform enables more than 30,000 mail and parcel deliverers to access a wealth of information both at home and in the workplace.
“As part-time workers, our mail teams do not have a lot of contact with the wider business or even each other,” explains Krom. “The community overcomes this, enabling us to share both corporate updates and personalised business information, such as the expected weight of a mailbag or the weather forecast for a specific round.”
The community, which brings together multiple apps and activity objects, took just four months from idea to implementation. As Krom confirms: “We used an Agile development approach and used as much ‘out-of-the-box’ Salesforce functionality as possible.”
The online community has been a great success with more than 80 percent of mail men and women logging on every week. “Our people are our ambassadors. The moment of delivery defines how customers experience PostNL, and we need to make that moment as seamless and flawless as possible,” comments Krom.
“Staff now know exactly when their mailbag will be ready for them at the depot, which means they don’t waste time waiting. This used to be a major complaint,” says Krom. “They can also book leave more easily – in the past they would have to request a day off months in advance as finding a replacement for the round was so difficult.”
Seizing the app opportunity
Things have moved on rapidly since the PostNL Parcel division deployed Sales Cloud back in 2011. With the parcel and mail divisions merging under the 1PostNL vision, sales and services will benefit from a 360-degree view of their customers across the board.
PostNL is adding another string to its collaboration by introducing a dedicated mobile app. “The app will transform how we communicate with our mail teams,” reveals Krom. “It will enable us to adopt more flexible ways of working and bring greater continuity to our mail services.”
From requesting bike repairs and booking a holiday to reporting an issue, the app will act as a virtual office for PostNL’s mail personnel.
“Going forward, we want to add more sender/receiver services to the app, for example proof of delivery for small parcels,” says Krom.
Founded on Community Cloud and the Salesforce Platform, the app will be accompanying more than 23,000 mail men and women on their daily rounds across The Netherlands by the end of 2016.
PostNL has been part of the country’s postal system for more than 200 years and delivers around 15 million letters a day.
As the app user base grows, PostNL plans to extend its functionality using Salesforce Chatter, an enterprise social networking tool. “With Chatter we will be able to build a community for each depot, so people can swap shifts or help solve problems,” says Krom.
At present, mail men and women can swap shifts by contacting the mail division’s internal service centre via the app or online community. These and any other requests are logged and tracked in Service Cloud.
“The service centre does all the scheduling and planning, which for 23,000 staff, is a big job,” comments Krom. “With the app and Chatter, we will be able to reduce the administration overhead by empowering staff to make their own shift changes.
“Power is shifting from the sender to the receiver, and we need to develop more services to stay the preferred provider for this target group,” continues Krom. “Technology – and our relationship with Salesforce - will help us stay competitive.”
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