Yodel

Yodel is a new parcel delivery and collection service brand as well as one of the largest couriers in the UK

Profile

Industry: Logistics Deliveries: 115m annually Revenue: £505.7 million

Background: Nationwide parcel collection and delivery business operating across 60 sites

Challenge: To provide the level of CX needed to be competitive and offer customers channels of choice

Solution: IVR and advanced speech recognition to provide automated customer information lines

Benefit:

• 30% increase in calls handled without agent involvement
• 50% reduction in abandoned calls
• 83% reduction in calls going directly to an agent

Background

Yodel is a new parcel delivery and collection service brand, as well as one of the largest couriers in the UK. They have 60 sites across the UK to coordinate collections and deliveries and annually deliver 115 million parcels. Driven by the upsurge in online shopping, the logistics industry is seeing a comparable increase in demand for home delivery and collection services.

Challenge

Yodel intended to improve its focus on the customer and was reviewing the way it enabled its customers to track orders, change a delivery address, or change a delivery date. The telephone is an extremely important channel for customers and the business needed to reflect the versatility of the services that they provided through other channels.

Yodel's existing automated telephone system needed a radical update to provide the customer service standards necessary for their customers. With a primary aim to produce a quicker, consistent and more efficient service for all callers, they turned to Eckoh for the solution.

Solution

Following an in-depth contact center discovery session to establish Yodel's exact needs, Eckoh implemented a completely new self-service solution. The system uses a combination of speech recognition and touchtone-enabled automation to guide customers effortlessly to their desired outcome; which could be parcel tracking, redelivery, or collection options. When customers call the automated system, they are recognized by the incoming number they call and then offered the appropriate set of menu options. Integrated with the client's internal CRM system, the solution provides callers with an up-to-date status on their parcel. Using advanced speech recognition alongside the touch tone functionality means that customers can verbally communicate answers in their own words.

This provides a much faster customer journey than through conventional IVR menu structures:

• Improved call routing - the customer 'need' is identified and routed appropriately
• Better security - Identifying and verifying an existing customer. Knowing if they are a residential account or premier customer helps to present them with the correct IVR options (or route them to an agent more quickly)
• Better customer interaction - quick communication with the customer using a speech recognition option as well as touchtone.

"The new IVR solution has led to improved customer service by having more channels for customers to contact Yodel. This frees up contact center agents to focus on more complex or higher-value calls. Since implementation, caller interaction levels with the new system have been in excess of 90% and bringing significant benefits, improvements and efficiencies." Yodel

Value

Implemented within just two months, Eckoh designed and deployed the new cloud-hosted IVR service, built on their resilient infrastructure. As well as its advanced functionality, the system is also scalable to support peaks in volumes that occur at Christmas, for example. During these periods, call volumes can range from four to seven times those of a normal week.

On its first day, the new system handled over 10,000 calls. Since then, caller interaction levels have been in excess of 90% and brought significant benefits and improvements:

• 32% increase in calls via the IVR that need no agent. (60% of all calls through the IVR are serviced without any need for a live agent to be involved, increased from 32% on the previous system)
• 50% reduction in call abandonment as more callers choose to use the new service
• 83% reduction in calls that go directly to an agent, exceeding expectations. Calls directly to an agent have reduced from c.60% to 10%, far exceeding initial expectations
• Callers can speak to an agent from the main menu with minimal delay
• 24x7x365 parcel tracking and redelivery service availability
• Frees up contact center agents to focus on more complex inquiries
• Confident management of traffic peaks
• Elimination of manual transcription
• Access to real-time business intelligence

Looking Forward

As a solution unique to Eckoh, we recognize that this example is likely a challenge many other enterprise organizations struggle with when they begin tackling payment security within their contact centers. Some organizations may even feel like their only option is to either deploy hardware on-premise – likely disrupting long-term cloud transformation strategies – or only achieve partial PCI DSS de-scoping.

As a result, the methodology innovated for The Client is now part of the Eckoh architecture. In fact, multiple other clients have also taken advantage of this solution, allowing them to maintain their existing telephony architecture while maintaining the strictest possible standard for payment security.

To learn more about how Eckoh secures payments across all engagement channels, please contact one of our trusted advisors.