Better tracking ability needed, if you please

The Australian, 04 November 2008, Fran Foo

case study | Couriers Please

PARCEL distribution company Couriers Please realised a few years ago that the opportunity to expand its business was there for the taking, but the first step would have to be a massive overhaul of its communications platform.

One of the biggest problems was its rigid contact centre.

"It was a localised contact centre system, built at each branch, so it was very much a silo approach," says Emmanuel Psaltis, chief executive of Couriers Please, a subsidiary of New Zealand Post. The company had no redundancy options, so it suffered when systems failed.

Its on-premises contact centre meant a system failure in one location made it impossible to divert calls to other branches.

"There was quite a bit of failure, primarily because of the lack of sophistication and the age of the equipment.

"We had quite a bit of downtime at our call centres," Psaltis says. Couriers Please was using an Avaya-Ericsson premises-based system.

It then decided to shop for something new, preferably a more flexible, externally hosted system. Couriers Please has more than 37,000 customers and delivers more than 8 million parcels annually.

It has 550 contractors and 150 staff in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, the Gold Coast, Adelaide and Perth, and offers nationwide service.

The company's contact centre difficulties were just part of the problem, as it wanted to integrate its communications platform and investigate whether technology such as internet protocol telephony was viable.

It was also looking at more sophisticated mobile scanners down the track and would need a more robust communications network to manage that. A tender, worth millions of dollars, was put to market in 2004 and AAPT bagged it, beating Telstra, Optus and Macquarie, Psaltis says.

The hosted contact centre component of the AAPT contract was awarded to Melbourne-based Global Speech Networks (GSN), using the Genesys contact centre application.

Couriers Please technology director Alistair Alderson says the hosted system has many benefits and the company would not contemplate going back to an on-premises system. Alderson says having a hosted contact centre saved the company from a pre-Christmas meltdown last year when a sudden storm hit its main base at Homebush, Sydney.

Couriers Please was left with no communication links for more than a week - an intolerable time gap.

"At first we were told it would be fixed in 10 to 15 minutes, that stretched out to a few hours and then it was more than a week," Alderson recalls.

Couriers Please telecommunications partner Gen-i tried without success to restore connections with the supplier, Telstra.

"The Gen-i folks were great and working overtime but in the end the downtime stretched out to more than a week. It was unbelievable," he says.

Both AAPT and Gen-i are divisions of Telecom New Zealand.

Finally, Couriers Please's telephone connection was up and running in five days but the data line took eight days to restore.

If the company had not been running its business through a hosted contact centre, all customer calls to its Sydney base would have been disrupted.

"We wouldn't have been able to reroute the Sydney calls to other locations," Alderson says.

It would have lost about 60 per cent of business if it wasn't for the hosted contact centre, he says. Alderson is looking forward to enhancements to the hosted contact centre system in conjunction with GSN.

One service he's excited about is enabling customers to track and trace their parcels using a coupon number keyed into their phones.

It already offers that service on the internet.

"By being able to do this over the phone our customers can keep track of their parcels from anywhere and even without an internet connection.