CitySprint

 
700 employees

17%

+ engagement by using Pardot to personalise marketing content

 
 

CitySprint makes sending parcels easier for thousands of customers with Salesforce

Sending and receiving a package is an emotional transaction. And that’s why CitySprint wants to make the delivery process as quick and easy as possible for its thousands of customers. “We don’t just want to deliver parcels, we want to deliver added value,” said Rosie Bailey, Commercial Director at CitySprint. “We’re constantly evolving our services to provide our customers with a better experience.”

New digital workflows and engagement channels have already helped CitySprint unlock greater value. Thanks to a new digital onboarding process, business customers can now open a trading account online and book a delivery in under 60 minutes. It used to take at least 24 hours. “Speed is of the essence for a lot of our deliveries,” explained Bailey. “With Salesforce, we can help more customers ship critical packages quickly and easily.”

The new process, which is built on Experience Cloud and Sales Cloud, enables CitySprint to automate key onboarding tasks, including creating a customer account, activating an online booking profile, carrying out credit checks via Creditsafe, and sending a welcome pack. “Salesforce is the linchpin for our digital onboarding strategy. It’s eliminated the need for manual forms and interactions,” added Bailey.

CitySprint puts customer experience at the heart of its brand

CitySprint makes more than 15 million deliveries every year on behalf of its customers, which include retailers, manufacturers, broadcasters, and more than 100 NHS trusts. It operates 33 delivery service centres across the UK and has access to a fleet of 5,000 couriers, including 130 that use zero emission vehicles. “Offering our customers a diverse range of vehicles to suit their business is important to us – from green options, such as cargo bikes and e-vans, to traditional modes of transport, such as motorbikes and vans,” said Bailey.

CitySprint implemented Salesforce in 2019 to bring its systems, processes, and teams closer together. The platform is integrated with the company’s operating system, CityTrak, and touches every stage of the customer journey – from nurturing leads and booking deliveries to answering queries and resolving complaints. To fast-track the transformation and boost user adoption, CitySprint tapped into various Salesforce Accelerators and trails on Trailhead.

The implementation was part of a wider business transformation that involved consolidating 36 contact centres to just six and creating 450 smarter workflows for users. “Providing a great customer experience is at the heart of our brand,” said Bailey. “With Salesforce, we can help our teams take the right actions at the right time to safeguard critical deliveries.”

Greater visibility enables faster response to queries

CitySprint’s 124 customer service agents play a key role in helping to schedule deliveries and resolving general enquiries. The team provides omni-channel support, which includes handling around 7,000 emails and 11,000 calls a week with an average duration of five minutes. “With Service Cloud, we can provide a consistent experience across multiple channels and capture every customer interaction,” said Bailey.

An integration between Service Cloud and Vonage provides agents with visibility of the caller’s details, case history, and any recurring issues. “With Service Cloud, we can respond 35% faster to customer queries and handle an extra 28% of case work with the same headcount,” said Daniel Welch, National Customer Operations Manager at CitySprint. “We can have more informed conversations and provide a more responsive service to shippers and consumers.”

Since implementing Service Cloud, CitySprint has more than halved the call abandonment rate and boosted customer Net Promoter Scores by nearly 600%. CitySprint uses Service Cloud to conduct around 300 post-call surveys per week as well as quarterly NPS surveys. “The insights we capture help us identify and resolve issues impacting agent productivity and call quality more rapidly,” added Bailey.

CitySprint, which has the largest same day courier network in the UK, also uses Service Cloud and Vonage to route some calls to its operational team so they can provide immediate answers to customer queries about critical deliveries.

Omni-channel service increases choice and convenience

Shippers and consumers can also engage via web chat, which is powered by Service Cloud’s Live Chat. Agents respond to approximately 800 web chats per week with a satisfaction rating of around 80% for chats.

To boost the efficiency and quality of its customer services even further, CitySprint plans to use Einstein Bots to field web chats that relate to deliveries for specific retailers. This will help to free up agents to handle more complex queries. “We want to make it easy for our customers to engage with us on any channel,” said Bailey. “With Service Cloud, we can understand how, when, and why people contact us and flex our resources and processes to provide greater choice and convenience.”

CitySprint adapts its services and teams during pandemic

CitySprint’s flexibility was put to the test during the COVID-19 pandemic when the volume and type of customer deliveries changed dramatically. In the space of 10 days, bookings for its London service centre rose by 47% as city firms scrambled to set up employees to work from home with office furniture and IT equipment.

Demand from healthcare customers also increased, with CitySprint playing a key role in shipping PPE supplies, COVID-19 tests, and equipment for the Nightingale Hospitals. And it was the same in the retail sector. “During the lockdown of spring 2020, we were making nearly 10,000 deliveries a week on behalf of one DIY retailer!” revealed Bailey.

But it wasn’t just CitySprint’s customers that had to adapt to new ways of operating; the company also had to transition its six on-site customer service centres into a virtual team. “Thanks to the visibility and flexibility offered by Service Cloud and Vonage, the shift to working from home was seamless,” said Bailey. “Our agents were able to keep taking customer calls at a time when they needed our services more than ever.”

Agent productivity actually increased following the shift to working from home, with call abandonment rates falling to just over 2%. The forced experiment has been such a success that CitySprint now plans to offer flexible working to some of its agents on a permanent basis.

Smarter pipeline management supports rapid growth

CitySprint recruited an additional 450 couriers in 2020 to handle the increased customer demand, and expects delivery volumes and services to continue to grow in 2021. As well as signing up customers through its website, CitySprint actively targets new prospects. “With Sales Cloud, we can track every interaction with every prospect and unlock new insights into our performance,” commented Bailey.

With its commercial team targeted to log a minimum of five opportunities and conduct 40 meetings a month, a central view of the sales pipeline is essential. “With Sales Cloud, we can see how quickly leads are progressing and identify any problems,” said Bailey. “It also helps us inject a bit of fun and competition into the process with sales league tables.”

And CitySprint is top of the league when it comes to securing new business. In the second half of 2020, it signed up nearly double the number of new customers compared with the previous year - and with a smaller sales team. Automated workflows in Sales Cloud ensure that data captured during the sales cycle is shared with colleagues in other departments, such as credit control and customer service, to ensure a seamless onboarding experience.

Personalised content and campaigns boost engagement

By integrating Pardot with its website, CitySprint can capture a prospect’s browsing history and their details via web forms. “The more we know about a prospect enables the marketing team to create personalised and dynamic content on different channels,” explained Niall Tulip, Head of Marketing Operations for CitySprint. Since using Pardot to personalise marketing content, engagement has improved by 17%.

A campaign designed to encourage new customers to start trading also helped to boost engagement, with 78 accounts going on to book deliveries worth more than £500,000. This is just one of 450-plus campaigns that have been created by Tulip and his marketing colleagues. “Pardot gives us insight into the true source of a lead,” said Tulip. “It enables us to track the effectiveness of different channels - from social media to print advertising.“

To ensure that only high-quality leads are passed to the sales team, CitySprint uses a solution from the Salesforce App Exchange to verify company data. “With Salesforce, we can bring sales and marketing together and collaborate more effectively on leads,” explained Tulip. “It’s been a real springboard for driving greater success.”

CitySprint races ahead with greater collaboration and innovation

Collaboration between other teams has also improved, which has helped to turbo-charge innovation. “It’s fabulous watching everyone work together more effectively; it’s sparking lots of great ideas and solutions,” said Bailey. “With Salesforce, we can keep finding new ways to connect more processes and unlock more insights to achieve a 360-degree view of our customers.”

CitySprint already has plans to establish a customer portal with Experience Cloud, which would provide self-service options for accessing invoices, updating account information, and generating personalised reports. “We currently spend around 450-person days a year generating reports,” said Bailey. “The portal would not only increase efficiency for us but also visibility for our customers.”

CitySprint also wants to use Service Cloud to link customer satisfaction scores to case information, helping agents prioritise their response to different queries. “We pride ourselves on offering innovative and flexible logistics services both nationally and globally,” said Bailey. “With Salesforce, we can extend this innovative and flexible approach to every area of our business.”

 

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