Customer Onboarding Process and Logistics Service Design.
DHL operate in over 50 countries, shipping cargo as small as a microchip and as big as a mobile heart clinic, across multiple countries and continents. They take care of the total logistical requirements, from collection, to storage, to shipping, to delivery and all the paperwork, legalities and requirements in between.
Challenge:
But to get this high level of seamless service from DHL, an enterprise organisation has to on-board as a customer and clarify their transport, cargo and logistics needs first.
DHL’s enterprise level customer (organisations, governments etc) onboarding process was costing them a lot of unnecessary time and money…and customers. It was complicated, slow, and there was a lot of manual effort and duplication. This not only made customers unhappy, but presented some of them with so much unnecessary complexity and delay that they took their business elsewhere. This lost DHL customers/revenue and meant the customer got inferior (but quicker) transport services.
The Service needed complete reevaluation and redesign to understand and realign it with its intended purpose and value. It needed to make on-boarding as seamless as the service, as simple as a conversation and as quick as possible – all without duplication, error or delay.
The challenge was to create an optimal and seamless end-to-end onboarding solution for their clients that automated as much of the activities as possible and allowed as much self-service as possible in a very complex and diverse business and service environment, ensuring human support quickly available, but unnecessary.
Approach:
I carried out Discovery & Research to gain insight into the business, on-boarding process (AS-IS), technology, locations, users and cargo types.
I interviewed stakeholders, shippers, warehouse managers, sales teams and clients to understand the process, pain points, logistics, costs, timescales, delays, duplications and scope of DHL’s client on-boarding.
I identified duplicated effort, processes and data.
I uncovered all use cases and service processes, end-to-end, identifying many major delays, air gaps and inefficiencies to create a discovery report, new service design and recommendations based on impact size.
Outcomes & Value:
I delivered a pre-discovery and full Discovery report, a Service Design blueprint (AS-IS and TO-BE) highlighting the comparative reductions in time, cost, duplication, delay and complexity at every step. and presented the insights and recommendation to the C-suite.
I remodelled a new, optimised, service design, integrating automation and new client interfaces, whilst removing duplication and delays.
I added the extraction of cargo dependent data in advance, allowing the warehouse and logistics engineers to plan for these well in advance, and the administrative staff to plan pre-process customs documentation, manage trade compliance, and coordinate security and clearance procedures for import and export.
Recommendations helped the entire on-boarding team, from sales to logistics and support, and created an on-boarding model that could be rolled out internationally with measurable efficiency improvements.
- Clients were able to make comprehensive sales requests without long delays.
- Sales teams got more of the data they needed up front and could thus close deals quicker and more efficiently.
- DHL’s services became more competitive.
- Reduced on-boarding customer drop-off by 20% *
- Increased sales completions by 15% *
- Reduced the on-boarding process time by 40%
- Reduced the on-boarding work/data duplication 50%
- Reduced on-boarding cost by 25%
*customer supplied data
Testimonial
N/A
role – person