Yodel’s approach to building an improved customer experience journey
As one of the UK’s leading parcel carriers, Yodel wanted to build a robust customer journey that matched up to their customers’ specific needs and expectations. Built into this requirement was a need to develop a clear digital strategy, in order to fully transform interactions for the end customer, and the brands which use Yodel’s services.
There were several other specific requirements involved in creating the journey
- Establish new ways of working, to effectively meet the customer needs
- Replace standalone legacy systems
- Streamline existing journeys and processes, and reinvesting these resources into new technical solutions and front line customer teams
A truly multi-service client, we are proud to be supporting Yodel in transforming their customer experience. Working in close partnership with their customer teams, we deployed a wide range of Webhelp solutions in this multi-year project, including customer experience management, digital transformation, customer journey design and customer analytics, as well as our business process services.
Working with Webhelp
Yodel’s partnership with Webhelp was borne out of our detailed response to meeting their transformation requirements.
Identified as a partner with the necessary skills, flexibility and experience to help them reach their customer experience (CX) goals, our partnership began in 2015 and focused on Yodel’s strategic objective to improve their client/customer relationships as part of their ongoing digital roadmap, with particular emphasis on creating additional value from their CX function.
Utilising the unique skill sets of our people in South Africa & India
Webhelp reviewed the entire Yodel customer journey, end to end, focusing on people engagement, planning, and operational efficiency, delivering an omnichannel solution to support customer interactions across Voice, Webchat, Email and Social Media.
One of the first steps to creating this additional value from Yodel’s CX function was to transfer digital customer service to South Africa, allowing them to access Webhelp’s wealth of highly trained and experienced people to deliver outstanding customer experiences to Yodel customers through their digital channels.
The brief was to focus on people engagement, planning, and operational efficiency. A focus on fully orientating Webhelp’s people with the Yodel brand and customer base, combined with sound operational planning, helped achieve high levels of operational efficiency from the outset of the partnership.
Yodel were then able to both further enhance their CX function and create additional value by engaging Webhelp’s India-based teams, accessing their high-quality digital and back-office support to work hand-in-hand with South Africa’s customer facing teams.
Introducing eRin
Webhelp worked closely with the team at Yodel to support the launch of eRin, Yodel’s bespoke client portal, in 2018. The deployment of eRin was a truly transformative step in the development of the Yodel customer journey, delivering a centralised portal that enabled the organisation to better serve their customers across multiple digital channels.
Available 24/7, eRin allows Yodel’s business clients to communicate directly with Yodel, run queries on their customers’ parcels, manage those parcels while they’re inflight, submit claims and book return services direct from their customers’ doors, while providing their customers with any of the info they need.
As a result of these efforts for eRin, Yodel were awarded ‘Best CX Transformation – Inhouse Technology Solution at the 2021 CCA Global Excellence awards for eRin.
The results
In 2021, the Yodel and Webhelp partnership is in a very different place. Here’s what we’ve achieved together.
Awards success
As a result of Yodel and Webhelp’s efforts, Yodel walked away with Gold at 2021’s UK Customer Experience Awards in the Outsourcing category.
300+
people across our sites
People power
At the time of the rollout we focused on migrating customer volumes from UK into South Africa, starting with 50 people. Then, after we proved the value of the offshore model and growing South Africa to over 250 colleagues, we tested India as a location for digital CX contacts and now have over 300 logistics and CX experts across South Africa and India sites.
This diversification across sites has led to significantly enhanced business resilience, and much greater flexibility around peak periods. This in turn has led to greater customer satisfaction and faster call resolution when it’s needed most.
Customer trust
As of May 2021, Yodel’s Trustpilot score sits at 4.6, a huge increase on 2018’s score of 2.8. This is an incredible reflection of our shared desire to match Yodel’s customer journey to the needs of their customers.
4.6
trustpilot score
40%
savings
Re-investing in the right areas
Directly resulting from the efforts made by Yodel and Webhelp to streamline existing processes, we have been able to reduce costs across these journeys by an amazing 40%; savings which have been reinvested into more new tech solutions and, more importantly, into improving the workplace experience for our people.
A perfect example of this is the Advisor Lounge, a chill-out area where Webhelp’s Yodel advisors can enjoy a mixture of peace and quiet, table football, video games and relaxation rooms, specifically designed to make the contact centre a more enjoyable place in which to work each day.
A real world example - peak performance 2020
With a strong delivery team in place, consistent engagement and partnership alignment, Yodel were able to deliver one of their strongest ever peak performances for customer experience.
When Covid hit in March 2020, customer teams were still coming out of successfully managing the peak holiday period. India’s national lockdown came into force on 22 March – coinciding with Mother’s day in the UK, one of Yodel’s busiest annual trading days. Working swiftly, Webhelp’s India teams delivered a home-working solution that allowed their customer service colleagues to reply to 100% of queries, on time, and in line with regulations.
In advance of their 23 March lockdown announcement, our South African teams began to rapidly plan for home working, shifting to a Webchat only model through to August, and proactively signposting customers to this functionality. This clear, coordinated action allowed Yodel to remain 100% operational within 72 hours of the lockdown announcements.
The busy lead-up to Christmas 2020 came during an extended lockdown period for the majority of the country, with more customers relying on online shopping to provide for Christmas than ever before. Yodel were able to deliver 40% more parcels than at the same time in 2019, while still maintaining an average contact centre voice performance of 99.5% calls answered over the period.
The future
But we’re not finished yet. Yodel and Webhelp have ambitious partnership goals for the next couple of years, utilising our fully-embedded business process services to create even greater improvements to the customer experience. These include:
- Achieving Best in Category at Trustpilot
- Reducing customer contacts by c. 916,000
- A 25% reduction in contact to parcel ratio by 2022 financial year
- Increasing peak weekly network capacity by 1.35 million, whilst maintaining costs
Let's talktogether
