Helping Posts Thrive in the 21st Century

This article is an extract from the Spring Edition of MER Magazine published in February 2020. You can read the full article as well as other articles from MER for free by becoming a member of Post & Parcel today.

Last spring, Escher won the Technology category at the 2019 World Post & Parcel Awards after unveiling its enhanced customer engagement platform, Riposte, along with several other products. Today, Escher remains focused on helping posts thrive in the 21st century landscape with customer engagement and modern postal automation solutions.

MER speaks to six members of Escher’s executive team to learn more about the company’s plans for the future, its approach to innovation, and how posts can reconcile digital transformation with business-as-usual activities.

Nick Manolis – CEO

How are you positioning Escher to remain at the forefront of customer engagement technology and solutions for posts?

We actively listen to posts to understand their challenges and opportunities. At the same time, we survey the landscape of emerging technologies and select or build the solutions we think will help posts remain profitable well into the future. We also proactively build strategic relationships with organisations we think can offer value for our postal customers. This is what being a good partner is all about, and we’ve been a trusted partner to posts for decades.

The most recent manifestation of our mandate is our customer engagement platform, Riposte. We’re known for our counter solutions, and over the past few years we’ve been working to extend that reliability to a completely revamped platform and comprehensive suite of solutions that posts can use to ensure longterm success. Specifically, the new and improved Riposte platform empowers posts with a modular, scalable solution designed to help them make the most of emerging technologies without abandoning their previous IT investments.

Put simply, we’ve positioned ourselves to be at the forefront by constantly asking ourselves, “What answers will we need to have for posts in the next six months? In the next two years? In the next five years?” And once we’ve agreed on what those questions are, we get to work making sure we have solutions ready. For instance, the enhanced Riposte platform answers some of the biggest questions for posts today including:

• How do we offer a digital-first experience to our customers?
• How do we make our postal services an integral part of younger consumers’ lives?
• How do we leverage our leading infrastructure to service the growing parcels market?
• How do we capture a significant slice of the growing e-commerce market?
• How do we make the most of the latest tools and technology to simultaneously increase revenue while reducing operational costs?
• How do we succeed in the growing cross-border shipments market?
• Our Riposte platform offers solutions and tools for all of these questions.

Jeremy Folkes – Chief Product Officer

You launched several products last autumn. Tell us about these products and what posts need to know

Our team is very deliberate about which products we choose to develop, so that we can deliver the most value for our customers. Today, we have a suite of tools that address various challenges for our posts in terms of data science for continuous improvement, transparency in cross-border shipments, support for PUDO networks, and more.

One product we announced was Riposte Insight. Posts service countless customers every day, both in-store across their network and online. There is a huge opportunity for posts to gather valuable insight on what they’re doing well and what they can improve. Riposte Insight allows posts to quickly create end-to-end customer satisfaction surveys with a variety of question types. Plus, it comes with over 300 sample survey templates.

We also unveiled our Riposte AI solution. We’re especially proud of this product, because it really emphasises our approach to delivering value to posts. This tool takes the information gathered by Riposte Insights as well as data collected about posts’ operations at the branch level to produce actionable recommendations. In other words, posts aren’t overwhelmed by the amount of data they collect. Their data is translated into concrete insights that they can implement to reduce operational costs or increase revenue.

I want to also highlight our new Taxes, Duties and Compliance solution. With global e-commerce sales projected to reach US $6.54 trillion by 2022, posts are eager to capture a slice of the market. We’ve partnered with Hurricane, the world leader in calculating duties and taxes and compliance screening, to provide a proper solution for our customers. With our Taxes, Duties, and Compliance capabilities, posts can offer customers transparency on their shipping costs to avoid landing cost shocks and help them navigate confusing rules around what they can and can’t ship.

While we’re on the topic of e-commerce, it’s also worth mentioning Riposte PUDO. Riposte PUDO allows posts to expand their postal network by turning third-party retailers, university campuses, train stations, and more into pick up, drop off points. This way, customers can easily return products or pick up deliveries. Customers receive a reliable delivery point and posts avoid costly re-delivery attempts.

This article is an extract from the Spring Edition of MER Magazine published in February 2020. You can read the full article as well as other articles from MER for free by becoming a member of Post & Parcel today.